Team Foundation Power Toys

  • Article

The other day I was asked the questions: 

  • Can I rollback a Changeset?
  • Can I produce a list of items I changed while I was offline?

Of course you can, but you need to use Team Foundation Power Toys or tfpt.exe.  This utility can be found in the Visual Studio 2005 SDK of which you can download at https://www.vsipmembers.com/.  Once the SDK is installed you will find tfpt.exe at %ProgramFiles%\Visual Studio 2005 SDK\2006.06\VisualStudioTeamSystemIntegration\Utilities\Team Foundation Power Toys

Features include ( The following was taken straight from the tfpt.exe's ReadMe.doc found in the SDK. )

  • Unshelve (Unshelve + Merge)   
    •  The unshelve operation supported by tf.exe does not allow shelved changes and local changes to be merged together. TFPT’s more advanced unshelve operation allows this to occur under certain circumstances.
  • Rollback
    • Sometimes it may be necessary to undo a checkin of a changeset. This operation is directly not supported by Team Foundation, but with the TFPT rollback tool you can pend changes which attempt to undo any changes made in a specified changeset. Not all changes can be rolled back, but in most scenarios the TFPT rollback command works. In any event, the user is able to review the changes that TFPT pends before checking them in.
  • Online
    •  With Team Foundation, a server connection is necessary to check files in or out, to delete files, to rename files, etc. The TFPT online tool makes it easier to work without a server connection for a period of time by providing functionality that informs the server about changes made in the local workspace.
  • GetCS (Get Changeset)
    • The TFPT GetCS tool gets all the items listed in a changeset at that changeset version.
    • This is useful in the event that a coworker has checked in a change which you need to have in your workspace, but you cannot bring your entire workspace up to the latest version. You can use the TFPT GetCS tool to get just the items affected by his changeset, without having to inspect the changeset, determine the files listed in it, and manually list those files to a tf.exe get command.
  • UU (Undo Unchanged)
    • The TFPT UU tool removes pending edits from files which have not actually been edited.