The Power Tools for Team Foundation Server have been updated for version 11 Beta. These tools provide essential functionality that isn’t included with the main TFS release. Since the complete feature list isn’t available online, the summary from the installed documentation follows.
Best Practices Analyzer
A diagnostic tool with a graphical user interface that you can use to perform the following actions:
- Verify that the deployment for Team Foundation Server is configured according to recommended best practices
- Identify the source of problems in an unhealthy deployment.
- Take a snapshot of the configuration of a deployment.
- Obtain usage data about the volume of data stored or accessed in the past 14 days. Includes specific information about database tables that have a tendency to grow and that may need to be reduced in size.
Custom Check-in Policy Pack
A supplemental set of four custom check-in policies to use to enforce software development practices during the check-in process.
- Changeset Comments: Requires users to provide check-in comments.
- Custom Path: Scopes other policies to specific folders or file types.
- Forbidden Patterns: Prevents users from checking in files with forbidden file name patterns.
- Work Item Query: Specifies a work item query whose results will be the only legal work items for a check-in to be associated with.
Process Template Editor
A plug-in to Visual Studio, this tool provides an add-in to the Tools menu. The Process Editor provides a graphical user interface for editing Team Foundation Server process templates inside the Visual Studio IDE. This tool also provides a GUI for viewing the values assigned to all fields defined in a project collection.
Team Explorer Enhancements
A plug-in to Visual Studio, this tool provides additional Visual Studio menu options and functions to support finding files under version control by status or wildcard, opening a folder using Windows Explorer from the Source Control Explorer context menu, and labeling files and folders in Source Control Explorer.
Team Foundation Power Tool (TFPT.exe)
A command line tool that you can use to work with files and directories under version control, team projects, work items, and build definitions. Some commands display a graphical user interface when run.
Test Attachment Cleaner
When testers execute Test Runs (whether automated or manual), bunch of diagnostic data is captured in form of Test attachments, which gets saved in TFS database. This tool helps in deleting Test attachments that are no longer relevant from business perspective (using knobs/filters), thereby reclaiming the database space.
Windows PowerShell Cmdlets
This tool provides a Windows PowerShell interface that supports basic version control commands and a pipeline and glue to enable scripting.
Windows Shell Extensions
This tool provides integration with Windows Explorer and the common file dialogs. With this integration, you can perform many source control operations without having to run Visual Studio or a Team Foundation command-line tool.
Note: This tool essentially works like TortoiseSVN, though it is missing some useful features such as “blame”.
