Sneak peek at a TFS Vista gadget in development

Today I am going to give you a sneak peek at our TFS Query Tracker gadget. Currently is in Alpha, if such state exists for a PowerTool, but we plan to give it to you in Beta form probably in the March-April timeframe.

The functionality of the sidebar is very simple: Allows users to track Priority, State and AssignedTo counts for any query that is on the server. What does it look like? Here is a pick of the main UI (art subject to change):

 

In here, you are seeing all of the bugs assigned to our team Active for Orcas. The Breakdown at the top is for Priority1, Priority2, and Priority3 bugs. The arrow and channel on the bottom is to navigate to State and Assigned to views of this query.

Here is what the settings page looks like:

As you can see, in the settings page you can specify which channels you would like to track and select either our default query or pick any query on the server. In case anyone asks, it does enforce security so you will not be able to spy on other people.

Internally the entire team loves this type of gadgets because it allows you to track multiple things without requiring an instance of VS opened and constantly hitting refresh on the query. That alone to our testers is worth the price in gold J

Hope you enjoyed the sneak peek and stay tuned for more details and the Beta.