Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Team Foundation Server Power Tools

I work on some open source projects in Codeplex (Repository Factory and Chinook Database) and I've been using Visual Studio Team Explorer to access the source code repository in their Team Foundation Server.

Although TortoiseSVN is my favorite client, and I could use it through SVNBridge, I am still insisting in using VS Team Explorer just to get used to a different tool. One of the things I miss on it is the ability to undo files that were not changed. Perforce, another source code control that I used for many years, has this feature to undo unchanged files. This feature is important so that you only check in files that you modify, thus avoiding having unchanged files in your change list that would waste time of your reviewers!! If it is a small change set, it is not a big deal to manually undo them. When I was converting some projects from VS 2005 to 2008, I had to open for edit all files before initiating the conversion, otherwise it would fail. Most of the files did not change, and it became impractical to manually undo them due to the large number of files involved.

After a few searches, I found Team Foundation Server Power Tools which consists of a set of enhancements, tools and command-line utilities that improve the Team Foundation Server user experience. It requires you to have Windows PowerShell installed. One of the tools included is the command line utility tfpt.exe which provides the following commands:



In order to undo unchanged files in your workspace, you need to use the following command:
   tfpt uu
This command will list all unchanged files and then prompt you if you really want to undo them. It worked really well for me and saved me lots of time!

Besides the tfpt.exe command line tool, Team Foundation Power Tools also includes:
  • TFS Best Practices Analyzer
  • Process Template Editor
  • Work Item Templates
  • Custom check-in policies
  • TFS Server Manager
  • TFS Users tool
  • Alert Editor

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