This Beta release comes with a \u201cgo-live\u201d license and we use it in our development everyday.\u00a0 I hope that you will feel comfortable doing the same.\u00a0 As this is a service pack, it will be available to all Team Explorer Everywhere owners at no additional charge.\u00a0 This release will continue to work against any released version of TFS \u2013 2005, 2008 or 2010.<\/p>\n
Installing it is easy and uses the standard approach to installing Eclipse plug-ins.\u00a0 You\u2019ll find the installation instructions here: http:\/\/download.microsoft.com\/download\/8\/B\/1\/8B11ABAC-0957-44BB-BA7C-80DCD882D481\/InstallTEE.htm<\/a><\/p>\n Please provide us any feedback you have.\u00a0 You can use the forum at http:\/\/social.msdn.microsoft.com\/Forums\/en-US\/tee\/threads<\/a> and we will try to respond promptly.<\/p>\n It\u2019s fitting that we are releasing this on the first anniversary of the Teamprise development team joining Microsoft.\u00a0 Please join me in congratulating them on the work they\u2019ve done to produce two great releases in one year!<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a summary of the improvements in this release:<\/p>\n The initial Team Explorer Everywhere release was pretty good at globalization \u2013 the current plug-in will sort and displays dates etc in the users locale and handle a localized version of Team Foundation Server.\u00a0 But all the UI strings were hard coded in English.\u00a0 After shipping the initial release, a major engineering effort was undertaken to correctly externalize all these strings and prepare the product so that it can be translated into other languages.\u00a0 This is done using the add-in language pack model used for many Eclipse projects.\u00a0 After we\u2019ve shipped the beta release we will work on a Japanese language pack and make that available before the end of the year.\u00a0 After we ship the final release of SP1 we will make available Japanese, French and German language packs.\u00a0 Depending on interest we may look at translating to other languages over time.\u00a0 The model used also supports community created language packs if there is demand for them.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We had Gated check-in for the RTM release but it was more like the experience that we give to developers using Visual Studio 2008 with a 2010 server. The new release will give the Eclipse developer the same rich experience as Visual Studio 2010 developers get today. When you check-in code affected by a gated build definition you get a prompt as to what you would like to do<\/p>\n Assuming you request a gated build, the changes will be shelved and a build submitted on your behalf.\u00a0 When the build completes you will be notified right inside of Eclipse.<\/p>\n However \u2013 we haven\u2019t forgotten folks using the cross-platform command line client.\u00a0 There we have a new \u201creconcile\u201d command (only available in the cross-platform version of tf) that will allow you to check on the status of your gated build from your terminal window and reconcile your workspace with any changes checked-in on your behalf from the build server.<\/p>\n Combined with the Build Extensions Power Tool that was also recently updated, we have a very powerful build solution for your Java developers.\u00a0 The team have been using gated check-ins with the build extensions to build Team Explorer Everywhere for a number of months now and are very happy with how it works for them.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Alongside Gated Check-in we did the work to enable private builds from Eclipse.\u00a0 Again, this works in the same way as in Visual Studio 2010.\u00a0 If you want to perform a build on the build server then you can manually queue a build passing in a shelveset. That way you can validate your changes work on the build server before checking them in.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We also took the opportunity to catch up on some of the improvements that we\u2019d made to build explorer in Visual Studio 2010.\u00a0 You now have icons showing you the type of build that you have submitted and you are more easily able to find builds belonging to you.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In the new process templates that ship with TFS 2010 we make more use of HTML fields to provide a rich text field to enter information about that work item.\u00a0 These are used extensively by the Microsoft Test Manager tool to help a tester create a bug with a nicely formatted repro steps.\u00a0 The problem was that Team Explorer Everywhere didn\u2019t have a nice way to edit these fields as we did in Visual Studio.\u00a0 Eclipse 3.5 and above gives us better support for embedding a web browser control inside of an Eclipse dialog cross-platform and so we made use of this in the beta release to provide a rich HTML editing control inside the work item.\u00a0 For developers using older versions of Eclipse we fall back to the HTML editing control that we shipped in original version.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In previous versions of Team Explorer Everywhere if you are on a non-windows machine that is not joined to your Windows domain using Kerberos then you had the option of storing your TFS credentials in a file managed by Team Explorer Everywhere in your local profile.\u00a0 The problem is that the password was stored in plain-text \u2013 and just relied on your file permissions to keep this data secure.\u00a0 In the beta release we will make use of the keychain on Apple or the Key Ring on Gnome systems to store these credentials in a more secure manner.\u00a0 That said if people are really concerned then we still support the ability to log-in via single-sign-on or not store your password at all and just be prompted when you need to log-in.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We\u2019ve had custom control support for work items in Visual Studio since day one.\u00a0 Over time we also introduced the ability to create a custom control for web access users.\u00a0 In the RTM release of Team Explorer Everywhere we included some code to help with custom work item controls with the plan being that we\u2019d create some examples out-of-band.\u00a0 However, once we started looking at these examples we realized that the experience was less than ideal so we introduced some fixes in SP1 to improve the experience.\u00a0 After the beta is released the team will publish more details on how to create custom controls for Eclipse.\u00a0 It will be a third control implementation \u2013 this time in Java \u2013 so we will be looking for feedback as to how useful this is for you.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Eclipse plug-in has several features to help in ignoring files from the local file system from version control by the use of a special file called \u201c.tpignore\u201d that is checked in at the project root.\u00a0 This is especially useful for Maven developers, but others teams sometimes need to use it as well.\u00a0 For more information on the mechanisms available for ignoring files check out this post (http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/tfsxp\/archive\/2010\/05\/04\/excluding-eclipse-project-resources-from-version-control.aspx) over on the Team Explorer Everywhere team blog.\u00a0 We heard some feedback in the forums that this file wasn\u2019t easy to use so we\u2019ve added some UI for it in Eclipse to make it easier to ignore files and folders straight from the Team context menu in Eclipse.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In previous version of the Eclipse plug-in you were required to use an external tool to resolve merge conflicts.\u00a0 We\u2019ve fixed this to properly support the internal merge tool if available in Eclipse including support for 3-way merging.\u00a0 You can still use external merge tools if you prefer, but at you have more choice now.<\/p>\n <\/p>\nThe highlights of the Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1 Beta will be:<\/h4>\n
\n
Fully localizable product.<\/h4>\n<\/li>\n
Full Gated check-in support for TFS 2010.<\/h4>\n<\/li>\n
Support for rich work item descriptions<\/h4>\n<\/li>\n
A bunch of bug fixes and other improvements.<\/h4>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
<\/h3>\n
Localization<\/h3>\n
Gated Check-in Support<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"Image](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2010\/11\/6428.gated01_thumb_06466A2B.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Image](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2010\/11\/3223.gated02_thumb_67234D4A.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Image](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2010\/11\/7827.reconcile_thumb_65064E81.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nPrivate \/ Buddy Builds<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"Image](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2010\/11\/6431.buddy_thumb_0DC1B3CB.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nBuild Explorer Refresh<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"Image](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2010\/11\/1538.buildexplorer_thumb_007B2AB8.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nRich Editing of Work Item Descriptions<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"Image](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2010\/11\/5751.richtext_thumb_103ABFBC.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nApple Keychain and Gnome Key Ring Support<\/b><\/h3>\n
Work Item Custom Controls<\/b><\/h3>\n
.tpignore Improvements<\/b><\/h3>\n
Internal Merge Support in Eclipse<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"Image](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2010\/11\/2625.merge_thumb_34EBD733.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nSynchronize Perspective Decorations<\/b><\/h3>\n
![\"Image](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2010\/11\/6013.sync_thumb_24905F7A.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Image](\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2010\/11\/6318.Unshelve_thumb_3B6F30F6.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n