Team Foundation Server (TFS) Users Take Note: New Power Tools Available

There’s a new posting from Microsoft Technical Fellow Brian Harry, who’s also working as the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server out as of yesterday (9/9/2010). It’s entitled “Sept 2010 TFS Power Tools Release Available.” By themselves, using these power tools require a TFS 2010 client, so if you’re using an earlier client (2005 or 2008) you will also need to have the Power Tools for those versions installed as well.

What’s inside the latest tools collection?

• An Admin Console Backup/Restore Wizard which permits admins to set up and run configured backup plans for their TFS servers, along with lots of interesting information about when, why, and how you’d want to do this.
• Various Team Explorer Enhancements including items such as View With (enables developers to open workflows from the SourceControl explorer in an XML designer rather than the TFS designer), Clone Build Definition (set up a new branch to use as a point of departure to create a slightly-to-moderately-different sibling branch, instead of creating everything from scratch), Copy Work Item Shortcut (send a link to one or multiple work items to colleagues or collaborators through a right click menu item of the same name, to obtain and package up work item URLs).
• TFPT branches command, which operates in the tfpt command line environment, to enable users to view and manipulate code branches at the command line (and, by extension, in scripts or programmatically)

Plus, Harry also reports that lots of bugs in the previous Power Tools release have been fixed, with particular emphasis on the Best Practices Analyzer. Be sure to check it out!