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The Next TFS Power Toy Release

We are in the (very early) planning process for the next TFS Power Toy release.  You can read my earlier posts to see what constraints we currently put on Power Toys.  Some key constraints are things like "Pure add-on" and "Delivers real value".

How do we tell what is delivering real value?  Some of the Power Toy ideas come from internal use (dogfooding) and some come from common customer requests.  I'm eager to hear what you would like to see us deliver as Power Toys, so please comment on this blog post with your thoughts.  Of course, we won't be able to do it all but we'll definitely put them on our list and fit them into our plans.

Right now, the things that I think are going to be in our next Power Toy drop are:

Renaming Power Toys -> Power Tools

I first suggested this idea a few weeks ago and overall the feedback has been strong that this would be a good change.

Update to the TFS MSSCCI provider

We've gotten a lot of feedback that people need the TFS MSSCCI provider to work (better?) with branched projects.  We've heard you and are addressing it.  We also plan to fix all (at least all that I've seen) customer reported bugs.  Lastly we plan to include support for an additional IDE or two.

Some operational tools

You guys have probably seen the dogfood statistics I produce.  A lot of people have asked me how we generate them and what tools we use to manage our server operationally.  We have internal tools that we call TFSServerManager and TFSServerMonitor.  We are going to release these tools as Power Tools.

 

There are a couple of more things in the queue but I'm not ready to talk about yet (because I'm not sure when we'll have them).

Mario (a PM on the TFS version control team) wants to deliver some useful checkin policies as Power Tools.  He recently wrote a post soliciting feedback on this idea.  Please go there and give him some feedback.  If we see a good positive reaction, we'll get them in the Power Tool queue.

What else would you like us to do?

Thanks for listening,

Brian

Published Wednesday, September 13, 2006 12:34 PM by bharry

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# re: The Next TFS Power Toy Release

Wednesday, September 13, 2006 1:47 PM by krumpo
Please, release at least a 'mandatory comment' check-in policy as a part of TFS Power Tools !
You will please quite a lot of users :-)

Thank you

# The Neverending Quest for Feedback

Wednesday, September 13, 2006 2:30 PM by Rob Caron
Microsoft bloggers frequently blog their interest for receiving your feedback on ideas to improve our...

# re: The Next TFS Power Toy Release

Wednesday, September 13, 2006 2:47 PM by KeithH
Support for continous integration builds is a bit of a no brainer IMO.

# re: The Next TFS Power Toy Release

Wednesday, September 13, 2006 5:08 PM by Thys
And when is SP1 due? I mean, power tools are greater as add-ons, but fixing what's broken is a bit more important IMO.

# re: The Next TFS Power Toy Release

Wednesday, September 13, 2006 6:15 PM by bharry
The mandatory checkin comment policy is on his list - I'll take that as a yes vote :)

CI is a good suggestion.  It's certainly something we're looking at.

I hear you about SP1.  No one wants to ship it more than I do.  SP1 is a division wide exercise and therefore involves way more products and way more people.  It follows that it takes a lot more time.

There are other internal resource management conflicts that have extended SP1 beyond what I was originally expecting.  Unfortunately they are outside of my control.  I assure we (the division) are executing on SP1 as fast as we can and are making good progress.  I hope we can talk about the schedule in the near future.

In the mean time we can deliver value through the Power Toy delivery vehicle because there are no dependencies.

Brian

# re: The Next TFS Power Toy Release

Wednesday, September 13, 2006 7:22 PM by William Bartholomew
A couple of things I'd like to see, although some are bigger than a Power Tool:

1. Ability to stop a build from within Visual Studio
2. Ability to skip the dialog that prompts for the build type/location etc. when you start a build
3. CI for sure
4. Some more Team System specific web parts for Sharepoint (do these already exist?)
5. Round-robin selection of build locations (ie first available server)
6. Run "All Tests" option in Team Build without specifying a vsmdi file

That will do for now ;)

# re: The Next TFS Power Toy Release

Wednesday, September 13, 2006 8:22 PM by Grant Holliday
Hi Brian,

* Show labels applied to a file/folder within Source Control Explorer. A VSAddin?
(http://blogs.msdn.com/buckh/archive/2005/10/25/484854.aspx)

* Mandatory comments check-in policy

* CI that supports multiple team build types for a single team project. Think of 'team builds' for each 'area' of a team project.

* Guidance around using TFS and time-tracking. Where and how should/can it be done. (even if it is 'dont do it')

* tfpt bind support for the TFS MSSCCI Provider and VS2003 solutions.

* (Bug fix) When viewing "Group Members", the list of groups isn't sorted and after selecting one of those groups, it refreshes and loses the sorting.

There's my wishlist :)

Grant

# re: The Next TFS Power Toy Release

Thursday, September 14, 2006 5:52 AM by huckes
How about a tool that can go through and mark all of your process guidance for a particular customised process template as "not checked". This could be done via CSS. The idea behind this is that when customising and getting a process template up and running for a team, going through and adjusting all the guidance to suit is last on the list. It would be nice though to clearly indicate to the team guidance that had not been customised and guidance which had been reviewed and adapted for the custom template. Simply put have a different (selectable) font colour in the CSS style that can be used for unverified content.

Regards
Steve Huckett

# re: The Next TFS Power Toy Release

Thursday, September 14, 2006 6:19 AM by bharry
That's a lot of new suggestions so I won't try to respond one-by-one.  I'll just comment on a sampling.

I see a lot of build stuff here - it's good to see the passion around that.  We'll look into doing something in that space.

William, what kind of Sharepoint web parts would you like to see?

Improvements in history (particularly around labels) is a passion of mine as well.  We've got some work planned for that.  We'll see if it can be released out of band first.

I'll forward all of the feedback on to the right people and see what we can do.

Thanks,

Brian

# Question re: CI comment

Thursday, September 14, 2006 9:15 AM by Jim Lamb
Grant, you requested "CI that supports multiple team build types for a single team project." Are you looking to trigger multiple builds on a single check-in? I'm the new program manager for build, and I'm currently working on the specifications for continuous integration support, so I'd like to be sure I understand your feedback.

Thanks,
Jim Lamb

# re: The Next TFS Power Toy Release

Friday, September 15, 2006 8:59 AM by Michael C
Team Project Rename. This just seems to be such a basic thing and I've already had occasion to use it.

Thanks,

Michael Cregan

# re: The Next TFS Power Toy Release

Wednesday, September 20, 2006 6:46 AM by Paul Rulifson
I'd like support for working off line. Something that checks which files are modified in the local work space and marks them as added, deleted or modified.

Related to this is "validation" capability to let people know if what they are checking in might not match what they compiled locally. It is not uncommon for people to forget to add files they have created.

cheers,

Paul Rulifson

# re: The Next TFS Power Toy Release

Wednesday, September 20, 2006 7:20 AM by bharry
Thanks for your feedback Paul.  For offline, tfpt.exe has an online command -

tfpt online

that will do what you describe - it scans the workspace looking for files you've changed and will pend changes.

I agree that the problem of forgetting to add files is pretty common.  We'll investigate a solution to addressing that issue.  Thank you.

Brian

# re: The Next TFS Power Toy Release

Thursday, September 21, 2006 11:42 AM by Gunnlaugur Briem
* Invoking tfpt review directly in Visual Studio would be handy; I use it for any checkin of more than a couple of files.

* The option (or default?) of always doing tfpt uu /noget as part of tfpt review would be good too; when reviewing an intended checkin, unchanged files are just noise.

* In the tfpt review UI, if you click View for a changed project file, a new Visual Studio is fired up opening that project. This is probably not what one wants. Maybe disable the View button for project files and solution files? Or make it say "Launch new VS"? Or view them with a text editor? Or switch to the existing VS window that has that project open?

   - Gulli

# re: The Next TFS Power Toy Release

Thursday, September 21, 2006 1:00 PM by Pablo
- It would be great if you can incorporate a "move" option to move a set of multiple (selected) files in source control explorer to a new folder. Curently you have to go one by one :-)

- Right-click and "Copy Path to clipboard" would also be great...

# re: The Next TFS Power Toy Release

Thursday, September 21, 2006 4:03 PM by bharry
Great ideas, thanks!

# re: The Next TFS Power Toy Release

Tuesday, September 26, 2006 5:53 PM by Sarit
I would like to see some more information (size, last check-in date, last check-in user) in the source control explorer

# re: The Next TFS Power Toy Release

Friday, September 29, 2006 6:00 AM by ogiepogi
How bout a really force user to associate workitem?

they can only override a checkin if admins allowed them..

# re: The Next TFS Power Toy Release

Monday, October 30, 2006 8:38 AM by Gunnlaugur Briem

A bit late here, but one thing I sometimes long for is a "history search," a keyword search across all versions of a file or set of files. This is useful e.g. in a legacy setting when trying to understand the (possibly only historical) significance of a piece of code.

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