Take my word for it, install all three of these (in this order):
- The 2008 version of the Team Explorer
- VS 2008 SP1
- The July 2008 TFS Power Tools
You don't need to uninstall the 2005 versions of Visual Studio or the Team Explorer or the Power Tools. The 2005 and 2008 versions can exist side-by-side. However, if you are a user of ONLY TFS - i.e. not a developer and don't need the Visual Studio 2005 C# / VB.NET stuff, you might as well uninstall the 2005 Team Explorer. But again, that is not required.
A few things to look for
Once you have the above three items installed, look for these great enhancements...
TFS Alerts
The Team Explorer now contains a great editor to create and maintain alerts for TFS events. So you can set alerts for check-ins, work item changes, and builds. Now anyone can subscribe to just about any work item or build or check-in event in the system - without having to resort to using the bissubscribe.exe command-line tool. After installing it, you get a new Alerts node in the Team Explorer:
You can create all kinds of Alerts. Here’s one I’ve created to alert me when someone else (other than me) checks code into one of our international projects:
And here's an alert that lets me monitor whenever one of my coworkers checks anything in!! :)
When you create a new Alert, you can start from a blank one or pick from a few templates:
Here's another alert I created... lets me know whenever a "QA Issue" gets assigned to me:
You can also right-click on a source code item (file or folder), or work item, and select "Alert on change...". Like this:
Work Item Templates
I love this one!! Allows you to select any existing work item, select "Capture Template..." - which copies existing values into a Template, then apply that template to other new items. Like this:
Selecting "Capture Template..." pops this dialog:
So you can select which fields you want to copy to the template. In this example, I've deselected the last two fields. Then give it a name, and click Save.
Then you can create new work items from this template!!
You can also apply a template to a list of selected work items. So maybe you have a template called "Assign to Canada Development". In that template, you just have only two fields defined: Development Office and Assigned To, with values "Canada" and <blank>. Then you can select a bunch of work items from a query result, right-click, and select "Apply Template...":
The net effect is that all the selected work items would have their Development Office value set to "Canada", and the Assigned To values set to <blank>. Very cool!!!
Source Control Explorer "source location" is now editable - just like Windows Explorer
You can now select the server path in the Source Control Explorer (SCE) and copy-paste it. Further, you can type a server path in the text box, hit enter, and the SCE will jump to that folder.
Source Control Explorer "Local Path" label is now a link
Clicking on the link will open Windows Explorer to the location on your local hard drive.
Right-click and Cloak
Now you can right-click on any folder in the SCE and select "Cloak...":
This makes it soooo much easier to prevent those damn Help files from getting downloaded!!
Auto-check-out for ALL files opened in SCE
Ever open a file within the SCE, edit it, then go to Save the file and the thing is still read-only?!?! No more!! Now the SCE will automatically check-out any file that is opened in the SCE - not just VS solution and project items anymore. This is great for things like Word docs, database scripts, BAT files, etc.
Find in Source Control
From within the SCE, you can now find files by:
- Check-out status
- File name or wildcard
- Changeset
Here's a screen shot:
TFPT unshelve /migrate
This is incredibly cool!! One of the things I've always wanted to do with shelvesets is MOVE them to another branch. I work at an ISV, and we maintain many release and feature level branches. And occasionally someone will start work on a branch, only to be told later that the PMs have changed the target release for the bug fix or enhancement. This is new option allows you to enter a source and target branch, and effectively unshelve changes from one branch to another.
Annoying SCE refresh bug fixed
One last thing… that little bug in the 2005 Team Explorer that sometimes forced a refresh of the ENTIRE source tree when checking out or in from the SCE has been fixed. This drove me nuts – especially when working remotely.