Oct '08 TFS Power Tools are Available!
Yes, I know it's November now :( We had originally planned to release them about two weeks ago but an early release to our MVP showed us that we still had work left to do to really get it ready. You can read about all the cool new stuff in this release here: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2008/10/01/preview-of-the-next-tfs-power-tools-release.aspx. We think the release is in pretty good shape but as I say in that post, this is a very big and very broad release. As such we are expecting to have to do some mop up work in the next update. At this point I'm expecting that to happen in late Jan or early Feb. In the mean time, please let us know about any issues you hit so we can investigate them and fix them for the next release.
In addition to the major new features I listed in the post above (Team Members, Windows Shell Extension, Power Shell support, and Custom component download, tfpt unshelve /undo and BPA improvements), we have added a couple of new things. The include:
tfpt searchcs - A new tfpt command that allows you to search for checkins, filtering by date, user, path, and string matches in the comment and checkin notes. It's a very handy tool if you are looking for a checkin but aren't 100% sure what you are looking for.
Improved setup - The new setup now installs for "all users" rather than just the current user. This was necessary because the Windows Shell Extension can only be installed for "all users". That's not really an improvement, just a change :) The improvement is that the setup will now automatically uninstall previous Power Tool versions (including Dec '07, Mar '08 and Jul '08). This will eliminate one step when updating your Power Tools builds. One complication comes with the change to "all users" install. If you've installed previous versions using your user account and you install the Oct '08 release with the same user account, everything will work. However, if you installed the previous version with a different account than the one you install the Oct '08 release with, it will not work. You will need to log in to that account and uninstall the previous version. We had serveral MVPs hit issues with this where they had previous installs on other user accounts and had forgotten about it.
Oh, and one more thing I want to point out - the Power Tools can be installed and run on 64-bit clients. This includes the Windows Shell Extension (which means the Power Tools include both 32 and 64-bit versions of that component).
You can download the Oct '08 TFS Power Tools here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=FBD14EEA-781F-45A1-8C46-9F6BA2F68BF0&displaylang=en
We're very eager to hear what you think. You can either post on my blog or provide comments on the MSDN forum.
Brian
