{"id":7811,"date":"2008-04-21T14:11:01","date_gmt":"2008-04-21T14:11:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/bharry\/2008\/04\/21\/march-08-team-foundation-server-power-tools-released\/"},"modified":"2018-08-14T00:27:26","modified_gmt":"2018-08-14T00:27:26","slug":"march-08-team-foundation-server-power-tools-released","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/march-08-team-foundation-server-power-tools-released\/","title":{"rendered":"March &#039;08 Team Foundation Server Power Tools Released"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve just released a new version of the TFS Power Tools.&#160; This new Power Tool release will work only with the VS\/Team Explorer 2008 client (but against either a TFS 2005 or TFS 2008 server).&#160; If you haven&#8217;t taken the time to upgrade yet, I highly recommend it &#8211; you are missing out on lots of great new value we are delivering.<\/p>\n<p>Although this release is not quite as big as the record setting December &#8217;07 Power Tools release, it&#8217;s packed with great stuff.&#160; It&#8217;s got something for almost everyone but the largest portion will probably be most useful to TFS administrators.&#160; We know TFS administrators have been hurting and we are working hard to make their lives easy.<\/p>\n<p>There are actually 2 downloads for this Power Tools release.&#160; You can read below for details as to why.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/download.microsoft.com\/download\/2\/0\/e\/20e75000-79ff-43d4-894f-40da9e185c3f\/tfpt.msi\">TFS 2008 March &#8217;08 Power Tools<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/download.microsoft.com\/download\/2\/0\/e\/20e75000-79ff-43d4-894f-40da9e185c3f\/WssExt64Bit.msi\">64-bit TFS 2008 Sharepoint extensions installer<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#160;<\/p>\n<p>In addition to the new features listed, we have fixed quite a few Power Tools bugs.&#160; I don&#8217;t have a complete list to share but I&#8217;m told there are some very important fixes that you will want if you use the Power Tools.&#160; The new features include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Process Template Editor support for custom work item controls<\/strong> &#8211; This has been, perhaps, the most commonly requested enhancement.&#160; Anyone using custom work item controls knows that it has meant going back to editing XML for any work item type changes.&#160; This new feature allows you to continue to use the GUI editor when using custom controls. <\/li>\n<li><strong>TFSServerManager client<\/strong> &#8211; Long ago, I posted <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/bharry\/archive\/2007\/01\/22\/tfsservermanager-powertool.aspx\">screen shots<\/a> of the TFSServerManager tool we&#8217;ve written to monitor what&#8217;s going on in a TFS server.&#160; The tool has finally made it into the Power Tools.&#160; The accompanying TFSServerMonitor that provides availability and performance counter data has not yet made it but we hope to get that into a future release.&#160; None-the-less, TFSServerManager alone, provide some great capability, including the ability to produce reports like the dogfood statistics posts that I do for our DevDiv server every month. <\/li>\n<li><strong>TFS BPA support for Windows Server 2008<\/strong> &#8211; In addition to various rule improvements and bug fixes, we have updated the TFS Best Practices Analyzer to work on Windows Server 2008.&#160; This enables this valuable tool to help trouble shoot issues on all supported operating systems while providing the minimal amount of &quot;noise&quot; and inappropriate warnings. <\/li>\n<li><strong>Work Item Template improvements<\/strong> &#8211; We&#8217;ve made a ton of usability improvements to the existing work item template Power Tool features.&#160; If you haven&#8217;t tried out this feature yet, I strongly recommend it.&#160; It&#8217;s a great way to pre-populate template bug reports (and other types of work items) with much of the required data and reduce the overhead of entering lots of similar kinds of bug reports.&#160; The biggest improvements include:       \n<ul>\n<li>Work item templates have moved from a separate tool window to a new node in the Team Explorer window (including support for organizing them in folder, cut\/copy\/paste, drag &amp; drop, etc. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2019\/02\/image_4.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border-top-width: 0px;border-left-width: 0px;border-bottom-width: 0px;margin: 0px 0px 0px 100px;border-right-width: 0px\" height=\"244\" alt=\"image\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2019\/02\/image_thumb_1.png\" width=\"194\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a> <\/p>\n<ul>\n<ul>\n<li>Editing work item templates now happens in a tool window in the document well rather than the somewhat odd looking scrollable modal dialog that it used to use.&#160; This includes full document integration &#8211; toolbar support, dirty state, etc. <\/li>\n<li>With the integration into tool windows, we were able to significantly simplify the menu structure and reduce clutter. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<li><strong>Scriptable Team Project creation<\/strong> &#8211; Oh my has this one been on the back log for a while.&#160; It was a very common request right after we release TFS 2005 and we&#8217;ve finally gotten around to doing something about it.&#160; This Power Tools release includes a new tfpt command &#8211; &quot;tfpt createteamproject&quot; that can be used to create new Team Projects in scripts rather than having to use the GUI.&#160; There are a few important caveats here though.&#160; First, it will only work if you also have Team Explorer 2008 SP1 installed on the machine.&#160; There is a new API in Team Explorer 2008 SP1 that enables this new Power Tool command line.&#160; Team Explorer 2008 SP1? you say?&#160; How do I get that?&#160; Well, SP1 hasn&#8217;t released yet and I haven&#8217;t even blogged the new feature set in it yet.&#160; I expect some developments in those departments shortly.&#160; I hope to blog the feature set of TFS 2008 SP1 shortly and for the Beta release of TFS 2008 SP1 to follow soon after that.&#160; Keep your eyes peeled and know that once you get TFS 2008 SP1, this Power Tool feature will light up and suddenly scripting Team Project creation will become practical.&#160; Oh, an by the way, using Team Explorer 2008 SP1 and this Power Tool release, you can automate Team Project creation against both TFS 2005 and TFS 2008 servers. <\/li>\n<li><strong>Support for 64-bit Sharepoint farms<\/strong> &#8211; Due to an unfortunate oversight in TFS 2008, our WSS installation tool does not support 64-bit Sharepoint.&#160; We are rectifying this oversight with this new release of the TFS Power Tools.&#160; We now have a TFS WSS extensions installer that will work on 64-bit Sharepoint installations.&#160; Because this will only be needed by a few administrators\/operations personnel, we chose not to include it in the main Power Tools download but instead to make it a separate download that can be found<font color=\"#ff0000\"> here<\/font>. <\/li>\n<li><strong>Unshelve to a different branch<\/strong> &#8211; tfpt unshelve now supports a new option &quot;tfpt unshelve \/migrate&quot; that will unshelve a shelveset to a different branch than it was originally authored in.&#160; This provides a handy way to move pending changes from one branch to another without checking them in and merging and without having to do a bunch of manual work to figure out the common base version between the branches and work out the merge relationships.&#160; A very handy addition that we use quite a lot internally. <\/li>\n<li><strong>Improvements to tfpt review<\/strong> &#8211; We use tfpt review internally for managing code reviews and have gotten a bunch of feedback on how it could be better &#8211; particularly in performance of moving between the file changes.&#160; We&#8217;ve made several improvements to make the experience better. <\/li>\n<li><strong>Delete global lists in the work item tracking system<\/strong> &#8211; tfpt destroygl now allows you to delete global lists from the work item tracking system.&#160; Previously there was no way to eliminate a global list once it had been created.&#160; In the future, I hope to see this ability incorporated into the Process Template Editor, but for now, at least it is available. <\/li>\n<li><strong>Update bound Microsoft Office docs when the TFS server name changes<\/strong> &#8211; Bound Office\n documents (Excel spreadsheets and Project plans) include the TFS server name so that they can refresh their work item lists without prompting the user to connect to TFS.&#160; Unfortunately, there has been no way to update the server name in the event that you rename your TFS server.&#160; With the introduction of tfpt changedocurl, you can now update the server name, port number, etc in bound Office documents. <\/li>\n<li><strong>Performance improvements in tfpt online<\/strong> &#8211; I&#8217;m not sure how many people this will be a big deal for, but it&#8217;s been a big complaint internally where we have 10&#8217;s or 100&#8217;s of thousands of files in an average workspace.&#160; If you have large workspaces and you use tfpt online, you will likely notice that it now puts less load on the server and takes less time. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;s it but as you can see it&#8217;s a long list and it&#8217;s got something for almost everyone.&#160; I really hope you enjoy it and, as always, please send me any feedback you have.&#160; We are committed to continuing to deliver high demand improvements at every opportunity.&#160; I mentioned TFS 2008 SP1 in this post briefly.&#160; As I said, I&#8217;ll be blogging about it soon and I really can&#8217;t wait.&#160; The list of improvements is HUGE &#8211; probably twice the size of this list.&#160; Add that to the new version of Team System Web Access that&#8217;s being previewed now (see my earlier post) and it&#8217;s an exciting time for VSTS 2008 users.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks,<\/p>\n<p>Brian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We&#8217;ve just released a new version of the TFS Power Tools.&#160; This new Power Tool release will work only with the VS\/Team Explorer 2008 client (but against either a TFS 2005 or TFS 2008 server).&#160; If you haven&#8217;t taken the time to upgrade yet, I highly recommend it &#8211; you are missing out on lots [&hellip;]<\/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-7811","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-tfs"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>We&#8217;ve just released a new version of the TFS Power Tools.&#160; This new Power Tool release will work only with the VS\/Team Explorer 2008 client (but against either a TFS 2005 or TFS 2008 server).&#160; If you haven&#8217;t taken the time to upgrade yet, I highly recommend it &#8211; you are missing out on lots [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7811","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=7811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7811\/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=7811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}