{"id":2931,"date":"2012-09-14T23:00:43","date_gmt":"2012-09-14T23:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/bharry\/2012\/09\/14\/tfs-2012-power-tools-are-now-available\/"},"modified":"2024-04-25T07:17:48","modified_gmt":"2024-04-25T14:17:48","slug":"tfs-2012-power-tools-are-now-available","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/tfs-2012-power-tools-are-now-available\/","title":{"rendered":"TFS 2012 Power Tools are now available!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I know many of you have been waiting patiently.\u00a0 I apologize for the delay.\u00a0 They actually shipped yesterday but I didn\u2019t have time to write a blog post about it until tonight.<\/p>\n

Team Foundations Server 2012 Power Tools<\/a><\/p>\n

A few reminders about how Power Tools work and comments on this release\u2026<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. You can go to the Visual Studio Gallery page listed above to get a summary of what\u2019s in the Power Tools.<\/li>\n
  2. All the Power Tools were updated to work with a TFS 2012 server.<\/li>\n
  3. The TFS 2012 Power Tools that are Visual Studio add-ins only work with VS 2012.\u00a0 If you want add-ins for Visual Studio 2010, use the TFS 2010 Power Tools \u2013 most of them still work against a 2012 server (a caveat or two below).<\/li>\n
  4. Most of the TFS 2012 client Power Tools work with a TFS 2010 or TFS 2008 server (again, a caveat or two below).<\/li>\n
  5. The TFS 2010 and TFS 2012 Power Tools can be installed SxS if you use both IDEs.<\/li>\n
  6. The Team Members Power Tool was changed radically in this release.\u00a0 It was modified to take advantage of new TFS 2012 features.\u00a0 As such it is incompatible with TFS 2010 and earlier and does not run off the same team member definition data as the TFS 2010 Team Members Power Tool, making using the VS 2010 IDE and VS 2012 IDE together with the Team Members Power Tool a bit of a pain (double administration).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    For the most part, this Power Tools release is just a port of the existing TFS 2010 Power Tools to TFS 2012 and VS 2012 (along with a bunch of bug fixes).\u00a0 However, there are a few notable changes.<\/p>\n

    Storyboard Shapes Power Tool<\/h3>\n

    We added a tool for creating dynamically sizeable storyboard shapes to the Power Tools.\u00a0 It\u2019s not pretty (it\u2019s a command line tool) but it\u2019s effective \u2013 we used it to create all the shapes we\u2019ve released.\u00a0 This tool was previously released separately on the gallery but we\u2019ve included it in the Power Tools to make it easier to get.<\/p>\n

    Team Members<\/h3>\n

    As I mentioned above, we radically revamped Team Members.\u00a0 We did so in two dimensions.\u00a0 The client was redone to take advantage of the new rich expressive capabilities of Team Explorer.\u00a0 We also took advantage of new server extensibility features to better integrate with TFS\u2019s groups and identities system rather than the semi goofy model of checked in XML files describing your team information.\u00a0 The penalty for this is that it\u2019s incompatible with previous TFS versions.\u00a0 It was a painful call but we decided we wanted to get on the right infrastructure so we could more easily manage it and innovate on it going forward.<\/p>\n

    \"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

    \"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

    Agile Process Settings<\/h3>\n

    We added the ability to edit the Agile Project Management (think taskboard) settings with the process template editor.\u00a0 For now it\u2019s pretty primitive because all it let\u2019s you do is edit the XML but we expect to replace this with a nice interface for doing it in the future.<\/p>\n

    \"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

    Removed Power Tools<\/h3>\n

    Every Power Tools release I\u2019m asked how come \u201cX\u201d is still a Power Tool?\u00a0 Why didn\u2019t it make it into the product.\u00a0 Every release, our goal is to take a portion of the Power Tools and integrate them into the product.\u00a0 I make no promises about when or if every Power Tool will make it into the product, but I promise to try to make progress by integrating some of the most popular ones every release.\u00a0 Here\u2019s the Power Tools that have been removed because they have been incorporated into the product.<\/p>\n

    Work item alerts<\/strong> \u2013 We added the power of the work item alerts Power Tool to Team Web Access in TFS 2012.\u00a0 The downside of this approach is that if you are using VS 2012 along with a TFS 2010 server, you won\u2019t have this capability (because it\u2019s on the server in 2012).\u00a0 You would need to use a TFS 2010 IDE + Power Tools to have this ability.<\/p>\n

    Comments checkin policy<\/strong> \u2013 The comments checkin policy is now in VS 2012.<\/p>\n

    Rollback<\/strong> \u2013 Rollback has been in the product since 2010 but we only had command-line support.\u00a0 We added GUI support as a Power Tool for VS 2010 and now it\u2019s been added in the VS 2012 product so we removed the Power Tool.<\/p>\n

    Work item search<\/strong> \u2013 The TFS 2010 Power Tools introduced a super simple full text work item search solution.\u00a0 That\u2019s now been added to Team Explorer in TFS 2012 so it\u2019s been removed from the Power Tools.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Conclusion<\/h3>\n

    I\u2019m super happy to have the TFS 2012 Power Tools finally available.\u00a0 There has been quite a lot of clamoring for the backup\/restore Power Tool because we didn\u2019t include it in the Beta.\u00a0 Though you won\u2019t notice it, we had to do a ton of work to that Power Tool because it needs to support both SQL 2008R2 and SQL\n2012.\u00a0 This was the first time it\u2019s had to support more than one SQL version so we had some major surgery to do on it.<\/p>\n

    Anyway, I hope you enjoy using the tools.\u00a0 As always, we love to hear feedback and will work to address it.<\/p>\n

    Thanks,<\/p>\n

    Brian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I know many of you have been waiting patiently.\u00a0 I apologize for the delay.\u00a0 They actually shipped yesterday but I didn\u2019t have time to write a blog post about it until tonight. Team Foundations Server 2012 Power Tools A few reminders about how Power Tools work and comments on this release\u2026 You can go to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":244,"featured_media":14617,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11,5,4],"class_list":["post-2931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-announcement","tag-tfs","tag-visual-studio"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

    I know many of you have been waiting patiently.\u00a0 I apologize for the delay.\u00a0 They actually shipped yesterday but I didn\u2019t have time to write a blog post about it until tonight. Team Foundations Server 2012 Power Tools A few reminders about how Power Tools work and comments on this release\u2026 You can go to […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/244"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2931\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}