September 13th, 2006

The Next TFS Power Toy Release

Brian Harry
Corporate Vice President

We are in the (very early) planning process for the next TFS Power Toy release.  You can read my earlier posts to see what constraints we currently put on Power Toys.  Some key constraints are things like “Pure add-on” and “Delivers real value”. How do we tell what is delivering real value?  Some of the Power Toy ideas come from internal use (dogfooding) and some come from common customer requests.  I’m eager to hear what you would like to see us deliver as Power Toys, so please comment on this blog post with your thoughts.  Of course, we won’t be able to do it all but we’ll definitely put them on our list and fit them into our plans. Right now, the things that I think are going to be in our next Power Toy drop are: Renaming Power Toys -> Power Tools I first suggested this idea a few weeks ago and overall the feedback has been strong that this would be a good change. Update to the TFS MSSCCI provider We’ve gotten a lot of feedback that people need the TFS MSSCCI provider to work (better?) with branched projects.  We’ve heard you and are addressing it.  We also plan to fix all (at least all that I’ve seen) customer reported bugs.  Lastly we plan to include support for an additional IDE or two. Some operational tools You guys have probably seen the dogfood statistics I produce.  A lot of people have asked me how we generate them and what tools we use to manage our server operationally.  We have internal tools that we call TFSServerManager and TFSServerMonitor.  We are going to release these tools as Power Tools.   There are a couple of more things in the queue but I’m not ready to talk about yet (because I’m not sure when we’ll have them). Mario (a PM on the TFS version control team) wants to deliver some useful checkin policies as Power Tools.  He recently wrote a post soliciting feedback on this idea.  Please go there and give him some feedback.  If we see a good positive reaction, we’ll get them in the Power Tool queue. What else would you like us to do? Thanks for listening,

Brian

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Brian Harry
Corporate Vice President

Corporate Vice President for Cloud Developer Services.

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