Highlights from the Dec. CTP
Hi,
My name is Doug Neumann and I too am a PM from Team Foundation. My primary focus is the source control features, but I'm not going to dwell on that stuff in this post. Perhaps we'll go deep on source control in a future post, or you might check out the personal blogs from many members of our dev and test team like Buck, Jim, Korby, Jason, James, Chris, Akash, Adam, Jeff, Sam, or Tim.
In this post, we're going to hit some highlights of cool new integrations in Visual Studio that showed up in the Dec. CTP and some additional we're working on for Beta 2. You'll be getting some more in-depth coverage of a few of these features in the next few weeks, so do check back often.
Source Control Explorer. For those of you who have had a chance to play with the Beta 1 Refresh, you may have noticed the need to bring up the command line to do anything substantive with source control. If you're used to VSS, you probably missed the rich GUI of the SourceSafe Explorer. New in the December CTP is the Source Control Explorer which brings you a VSS-style GUI for Team Foundation right inside of Visual Studio. To check it out, just go to View->Other Windows->Source Control Explorer.
Go To Work Item. If you've had a chance to really use the Beta 1 Refresh, you've probably found yourself at least once looking to open a work item using it's unique ID. We spent several months using the Beta 1 Refresh for our own development, and this happened to me several times daily. In order to find a work item given its ID, you had to write a query which involves a dozen mouse clicks an additional open document. I must say I was a bit annoyed every time I had to do it myself. With the Dec. CTP, the process is simple -- right-click on the Currituck (Work Items) node in the Team Explorer and choose "Go To." This brings up a simple dialog where you type the ID, press OK, and the work item opens. If you really hate the mouse, try using ctrl-G to do the same thing.
Shelving. The Dec CTP is the first public build with our much heralded "shelving" feature. If you aren't familiar with shelving, think of it as a simple way to set aside your work-in-progress without having to check it in. It's great if you need a backup, you want to share some work with a co-worker, your boss has other things she'd like you to focus on, etc. To play with it, open a source controlled solution, check out some files, and then hit the "shelve" button on the pending checkin tool window. When your changes have disappeared, hit the "unshelve" button and select the shelveset you just put aside. This will restore your changes to your local machine.
Branching and Merging. Now that the Source Control Explorer is available, the launch point for branching and merging from the GUI is online. Branching is pretty simple to figure out. Right-click, choose "Branch," and fill out the details. Merging is only slightly more complicated as you have to run through a quick wizard. Check out the "merge selected changes" option to perform a "cherry-pick" merge. By selecting this, you get to pick exactly which checkins you want merged from the source branch to the target. It's pretty cool.
Coming in the Beta 2 release are 2 more great features: Team Build and Reporting. Team Build is the out-of-the-box automated build process that does much more than compile code. With Team Build, you get a reproducible build, your tests are run, your code is analyzed, and your completed work items are updated with a build number. Reporting leverages a data warehouse that underlies everything in Team Foundation to give you some great views of what's happening on your development project.
To close, I want to encourage you to find some time to play with the Dec. CTP or the upcoming Beta and get us your thoughts. We monitor the blogs, newsgroups, and customer feedback, and we consider every suggestion closely. Team System has some great new features in it, but we need your help to make sure we get it perfect.
