TFS Power Tools Updated for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012

by Jenni Konrad on Sep 20, 2012 |

Microsoft has released an new version of the TFS Power Tools. This is an update to the TFS 2010 Power Tools, adding support for Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server 2012, as well as some new features that make use of functionality specific to TFS 2012. The tools can be used either with in-house TFS or the cloud-based TFS Preview.

The Power Tools that have been updated from the 2010 release are:

Process Template Editor
Team Members
Team Foundation Build Extensions
Alerts Editor
Best Practices Analyzer
tfpt.exe (Power Tool Command Line)
TFS Backups
PowerShell cmdlets
Windows Shell Extensions
Test Attachments Cleaner
Work Item Templates

The Team Members Power Tool has been updated to better integrate with new Team Explorer functionality in TFS 2012. Because of this, the updated Team Members tool will not work with TFS 2010 and earlier versions. According to Brian Harry from the TFS Team:

We [...] took advantage of new server extensibility features to better integrate with TFS's groups and identities system rather than the semi goofy model of checked in XML files describing your team information. The penalty for this is that it's incompatible with previous TFS versions. It was a painful call but we decided we wanted to get on the right infrastructure so we could more easily manage it and innovate on it going forward.

Other additions to the TFS 2012 Power Tools include:

Storyboard Shapes Power Tool - A command-line tool for creating resizable storyboard shapes. This was previously available as a standalone extension.

Agile Process Settings Editor - the process template editor can now be used to edit Agile Project Management settings. Brian Harry states in his post that the while the process template editor is currently a bare-bones XML editor, the team plans to update it with a more user-friendly version in future releases.

A few power tools are no longer included. Work Item Search is now a part of Team Explorer in TFS 2012 instead. Work Item Alerts functionality is included in TFS 2012's Team Web Access, so it will no longer work on TFS 2010. Rollback and Comments Check-in Policy have been removed because they're built into Visual Studio 2012.

The TFS 2012 Power Tools are available from the Visual Studio Gallery.