I’ve been remiss in my blogging responsibilities for the past few weeks – sorry about that. Between summer vacations, work travel and a new power tool I’m working on, I’ve just haven’t been able to find any time to blog. In my job, I don’t get to spend a ton to time coding – too many other things to do. But I decided to take on this Power Tool and I’m having a blast. The problem is that, for me, programming is all consuming. I was half joking to someone the other day that, for me, programming is incompatible with everything else in my life. It’s in compatible with eating, sleeping, meetings, email, blogging and everything else I’m supposed to do 🙂 Within the next week I should have this new Power Tool far enough along that I can talk about it.
In the mean time, back to the topic of this post… A few weeks ago, Attrice corporation released a new version of their TFS Sidekicks tools. They fill a similar need as the Power Tools that we release and I generally hear very good things about them. I’ve heard some particularly positive buzz about their new Permissions sidekick. Here’s a screenshot of it…
The tools are available for free and you should check them out.
Brian
Neno Loje on How Microsoft uses Team Foundation Server internally The NWCadence Blog on Speeding up…
I hope this is considered constructive criticism, as the items identified below are my wish list for either this product or VSTS.
This seems to be slightly easier navigation for permissions as compared to Team Explorer, but that’s about all it offers.
Like the team explorer view, it does not seem to walk the tree to show a user’s direct or effective permissions throughout the whole project. How to audit a user’s permissions? Really cumbersome to have to walk a tree if a user is granted permissions 5 nodes within a project, for example, and then have to do same for Areas and other permissions as per the tabs.
Iterations permissions not shown. I know, Iterations permissions are not as robust as areas, but they are present, so should be able to see.
No way to output reports. No print button or other means to export an audit of permissions. I guess this is to be expected, as mentioned above, it does not have anything to report as it does not walk the tree.
Does not show permissions to SharePoint or SSRS reporting services as integrated with TFS.
There is a checkbox for permissions, so I deselected an item for source control, yet no way to save or commit the change. Why have a checkbox if it does not effect changes? Without such a feature, I’m inclined to uninstall the product, as Team Explorer does this for me. Most of the time I’m digging into permissions, it is with the intent of updating it – it’s disappointing to find a permission, be taunted with a checkbox that would make me think I can change it, but cannot.
I’ve been looking for a means to effectively administer large projects with lots of users, with a complex security matrix for custom roles. I have not found such a tool yet as Sidekick does not meet my needs. Perhaps is a candidate for Power Tools or VSTS feature?
This is the first time I’ve checked out the sidekick. The feature that interests me the most is the Merge Candidates feature. I remember a while back you (Brian) posted some proposed ideas for rosario that had a change set browser function to see what branches a changeset was merged to. I hope this is a continued investment! In the meantime, the sidekick is a start. It crashes VS on me however after clicking the tabs about 8 times. I’ve only looked through the history tabs so far though. Until I get confirmation on the stability issues (where the problems lies) I’ll resist rolling it out to my team.
It has however made me wonder how easy this information is to get to. So I fired up a new project and created a merge candidate explorer! Wow. This was so easy I’m almost afraid to continue as I’ll spend all my time writing cool apps for tfs data rather than my real job 😉
I should have fired up the API much sooner than now.
rob
@Ken,
Thanks for your feedback. The Sidekick does walks the tree and that’s exactly its purpose – to show effective permissions.
If you have problems/feedback we’d be happy to answer; ping me at eugenez_at_attrice_info, since Brian is not going to fix it anyway.
Cheers,
Eugene
@Rob,
If you have any specific issues with Sidekicks, please let us know.
Cheers,
Eugene
New TFS Sidekicks release available Published on: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2008/08/18/new
etropic,
Yes, we have continued to invest in change visualization have have some awesome stuff working. I’m going to start blogging some of it shortly.
Brian