TFS Administration Tool 1.0 Released...with Shared Source!

It's been a long road, but it's finally happened...the first version of the Team Foundation Server Administration Tool has been released to the web! The TFS Admin Tool allows a TFS Administrator to quickly add, delete, and modify permissions for TFS users across the three platforms that TFS utilizes: Sharepoint, SQL Reporting Services, and TFS itself.

First of all, thanks and kudos should go to Kannan Sundararajan who developed the project and Sara Ford, who has done an awesome job as the Program Manager that's worked on ironing out our Shared Source collaboration model.

"What's that..." you say. "Shared Source? I thought that you guys didn't like to release your source code at Microsoft?"

That's right--the three Power Toys for Visual Studio 2005 that my team's been working on: Team Foundation Server Administration Tool, along with the MSBee tool (use MSBuild to target the .NET 1.1 Framework), and the Managed Stack Explorer are all being released as Shared Source projects on CodePlex--Microsoft's new online code collaboration community site. Say that five times fast. :)

Don't like the way something behaves? Download the source code and change it. Found a bug and want to tell us about it. File it here. Confused about something and want to ask a question about how to use the tool? Check out our forum on the MSDN Forums.

As for how to actually become a contributor and check code that you worked on back into CodePlex...well, that's a topic for another day, but Sara down the hall is working on how that's going to work.

For now, if you're a TFS Administrator, download the tool and help make the pain of setting up and administering your TFS server go away!