Everything you want to know about Visual Studio ALM and Farming
Brian Harry is a Microsoft Technical Fellow working as the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server. Learn more about Brian.
More videos »
After answering the first half dozen or so questions I got about Power Tool availability (within hours of announcing the RC on Monday :)), I kind of stopped. The truth is that we had not planned on producing RC compatible Power Tools. We did them for Beta 2 and are hard at work on finishing them off for RTM. However, the demand has been so high we started looking at how difficult it would be to get a build out and how long it would take.
Today we reached the conclusion that we can do it and they should be available by the end of next week - no later than 2/19, assuming nothing too terrible goes wrong. Sorry for the delay. I think we'll plan on producing the Power Tools for all go-live builds in future releases. Until then, you should be able to continue to use the Beta 2 Power Tools against an RC server. So if everyone doesn't need them, you could just keep a machine around somewhere with Beta 2 installed until we get the new build out.
Brian
If the PowerTools are this popular, shouldn't they be in the box? Is there one tool that's needed more than the others?
Some are more popular than others but there are a few that are very popular. We'd love to have them all in the box, but unfortunately, the day only has 24 hours and there's only so much we can get done. 8 or 10 of the Power Tool features did make it in the box in TFS 2010 and we'll be looking to get more of them in for the next version (but then, we'll be adding new ones so it will be a treadmill).
Brian-
Thank you! The transparency and responsiveness of the TFS Team has been unbelievable over the past few years, and this is just another example of how far you go out of your way to serve your (rather demanding =) ) customers.
@RichB - If they were in the box, we'd get new ones every 2-3 years. The whole point is that the PT can be updated and added to on a much faster cycle without quite the same MS Overhead that a full release requires.
I admit, I'm happy to hear about this, though I certainly understood the reasoning in the first place.
I guess its an indication of how solid and important these tool are that an out-of-band release is being forced (by popular demand) to become, effectively an in-band release.
Well done folks!
THANK YOU!
We are in the process of working/converting custom control for Relase candidate ( I hope the same control should compatible with final RTM Version of VS 2010.).If we get Power tool for 2010 RC1 that will be great
Thanks
Hi Brian,
I was wondering how the new power tools and MSSCCI Provider were looking.
Any chance that I'll be testing it out this weekend?
Any update on this as its now the 19th?
Same question as above?
and now I started refreshing the google search every 5 minutes...
more accurately, this page:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/teamsystem/dd408375.aspx
Ha! I've been doing about the same thing.
Yep me too, I need my power tools.
All you power tools guys, would you mind helping promote this suggestion to the dev team? I think these changes are urgently needed before RTM is finalized:
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/529470/changeset-history-and-update-details-in-explorer-shell-extension
I have a simliar post on Connect.
https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/532658/team-foundation-server-msscci-provider-2010-rc