TFS Power Tools September 2010 – It is fresh off the press and solves one of our Rangers HOL headaches

  • Article

The latest release of the TFS Power Tools has shipped and can be found here:

… loaned from book “Software Engineers on their way to Pluto”, symbolizing the launch of the latest tools :)

Looking at the download page the changes mainly are here:

  • Team Foundation Server Backups (NEW … very cool)
    The tool can schedule backups for the following databases that your deployment of Team Foundation Server uses:
  • the configuration database
  • the database for each team project collection
  • the databases that Team Foundation Server uses in conjunction with SharePoint Products, if your deployment includes integration with SharePoint Products
  • the databases that Team Foundation Server uses in conjunction with SQL Server Reporting Services, if your deployment includes reports

By using the restore wizard included with this tool, you can restore your entire deployment to new hardware, or selectively restore team project collections to an earlier point in time.

  • Team Explorer Enhancements (UPDATED)
    This tool provides additional Visual Studio menu options and functions to support finding files under version control by status or wildcard, opening a folder using Windows Explorer from the Source Control Explorer context menu, and labelling files and folders in Source Control Explorer. 
  • Team Foundation Power Tool (tfpt.exe) (UPDATED)
    A command line tool that you can use to work with files and directories under version control, team projects, and work items. Some commands display a graphical user interface when run.

The Team Foundation Power Tool contains a resolution to a bug we raised which caused a few Rangers headaches. In essence we were unable to run multiple tfpt.exe createteamproject commands in quick succession as part of our automated HOL setup, without tripping over exceptions. With this latest build, we were able to fully automate the HOL environment, running one PowerShell script that configures all available Rangers HOLs :)

Thanks for a great product TFS Power Tools team!

See Brian’s blog post for all the details here: https://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2010/09/09/sept-2010-tfs-power-tools-release-available.aspx.