{"id":3801,"date":"2011-08-08T12:49:34","date_gmt":"2011-08-08T12:49:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/bharry\/2011\/08\/08\/aug-11-tfs-power-tools-coming-soon\/"},"modified":"2024-06-14T10:49:21","modified_gmt":"2024-06-14T17:49:21","slug":"aug-11-tfs-power-tools-coming-soon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/aug-11-tfs-power-tools-coming-soon\/","title":{"rendered":"Aug \u201811 TFS Power Tools coming soon"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re in final testing for the August release of the TFS Power Tools.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been playing around with it for the past couple of days and it\u2019s looking really good.\u00a0 In this post I\u2019ll give you a sneak preview of what is coming and then, as soon as the download is available (another week or two), I\u2019ll blog the link.\u00a0 I hope you are really going to like it.\u00a0 We\u2019ve managed to get in a bunch of long standing requests.<\/p>\n

Key improvements in this release include:<\/p>\n

Windows shell extension updates<\/h3>\n

One of the complaints we get a lot on the shell extension is that if you are using anything other than a domain account, there\u2019s no way to enter your credentials.\u00a0 We\u2019ve added login support, see the screenshot below to see it working against one of the CodePlex projects I\u2019m a member of.\u00a0 This change also enables it to work against hosted TFS as soon as we make that available.\u00a0 To be 100% honest, this only fixes part of the problem.\u00a0 You\u2019ll see below that there\u2019s no way to save your credentials so you will, from time to time be prompted to reenter your credentials.\u00a0 Ideally this dialog would offer to save them in your Windows credential store, but unfortunately this dialog is actually in the product, not the Power Tools and therefore can\u2019t be updated in the Power Tools.\u00a0 We\u2019ll see if we can get the product updated to support this to really sew up this scenario.<\/p>\n

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

 <\/p>\n

Work Item Search (part of #14 on the TFS UserVoice list)<\/h3>\n

Another oft requested feature is to be able to search work items easily within Team Explorer.\u00a0 If you look at the screenshot of VS below, you\u2019ll see a new search box on the work item tracking tool bar (I\u2019ve done a search for the word \u201cadmin\u201d here).\u00a0 This will do a full text search of your work items and display the results like any query would.\u00a0 This feature is also getting added in our next version of the product but the search bar will be integrated a little better than we can do in a Power Tool.<\/p>\n

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

Rollback in the UI (#8 on the TFS UserVoice list)<\/h3>\n

In TFS 2010, we added rollback to TFS.\u00a0 Unfortunately it only showed up in the command line and for many people that\u2019s almost the same as not having it at all.\u00a0 We\u2019re adding it to the UI in TFS 11 and decided to release it a bit earlier than that in the Power Tools.\u00a0 There are two entry points.\u00a0 From the Source Control Explorer, you can do rollbacks scoped to a folder structure and based on a number of criteria:<\/p>\n

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

And in history, you can rollback individual changesets easily.<\/p>\n

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

Build Automation Utilities<\/h3>\n

We\u2019re continuing the process of taking all of the cool build automation utilities that William Bartholomew has built as part of moving the Developer Division over to TFS Build and incorporation those into the Power Tools.\u00a0 With luck, we\u2019ll continue to see contributions to every release.\u00a0 There are two new components in this release:<\/p>\n

tfpt builddefinition \/diff \u2013 Shows the differences between two build definitions.<\/p>\n

tfpt buildprocesstemplate \u2013 A set of new features for handling build process templates on the command line.\u00a0 Very useful for scripting stuff but also useful for doing things you can\u2019t do from the UI (such as defining which process template is your default and which is the upgrade process template).<\/p>\n

Maven 3 support<\/h3>\n

While I\u2019m on the topic of build, I\u2019ll mention that we\u2019ve added Maven 3 support to the list of supported build systems for our build extensions.\u00a0 We now support Ant, Maven 2 and Maven 3.<\/p>\n

Setup Improvements<\/h3>\n

We\u2019ve improved the Power Tools setup process to support in-place upgrade.\u00a0 You no longer have to uninstall the old Power Tools, you can just install the new ones and it will upgrade them.\u00a0 This is a request I\u2019ve been hearing from you all for a long while now.<\/p>\n

Test Attachments clean-up<\/h3>\n

In recent months, we\u2019ve found that one of the single biggest causes of bloat to TFS servers is all of the test artifacts that get added during test runs.\u00a0 We\u2019ve built a tool (that was previously released separately) that can be used to prune out old and likely unused test data that has accumulated in TFS.\u00a0 In the future, we\u2019ll be working on changes to the product to reduce the amount of data we attach in the first place.<\/p>\n

Best Practices Analyzer updates<\/h3>\n

As always, we\u2019ve updated the Best Practices Analy\nzer with the latest and greatest diagnostic that our support team uses to help get unhealthy TFS servers healthy again.<\/p>\n

And, of course, there are a bunch of bug fixes\u2026<\/p>\n

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

We\u2019re in final testing for the August release of the TFS Power Tools.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been playing around with it for the past couple of days and it\u2019s looking really good.\u00a0 In this post I\u2019ll give you a sneak preview of what is coming and then, as soon as the download is available (another week or […]<\/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":[5],"class_list":["post-3801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-tfs"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

We\u2019re in final testing for the August release of the TFS Power Tools.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been playing around with it for the past couple of days and it\u2019s looking really good.\u00a0 In this post I\u2019ll give you a sneak preview of what is coming and then, as soon as the download is available (another week or […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3801","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=3801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3801\/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=3801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}