Alternative to TFS Source Control Explorer

A while back a friend told me about a tool that was developed internally here that was an alternative to Visual Studio Source Control Explorer. I believe it was called Visual TFS. I seem to have lost the link. A few questions:

1. Where can I download it?
2. What features does it have that Source Control explorer doesn't have?
3. Who wrote it?
4. Where can I get the code?

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This is an app that I wrote (and am still using today). This was done on personal time, so I won't give out the code. It has the look and feel of SourceSafe, but using TFS as the repository.

It has the following features that aren't available in the existing explorer:
1) Use the users real name in all locations that currently their U number is used (i.e. histore list, finding shelved changes etc.)
2) Find in files

However, it doesn't have support for connecting checkins to work items.

It is still available, but I haven't updated it to support TFS2010, so if you are working on any code in the Cobalt copy of TFS, then this app won't work.

All comments

unknown

Ryan Morlok

Cool, Chad. Thanks. I am working in Cobalt, so I would need to TFS2010 support. If you update it, please let me know.

Randy Aldrich

Do you have a link?

Ryan Morlok

I don't have one, but it wouldn't work for me in Cobalt. Chad could Randy get a link to the exe?

Bhavin Shah

Have you looked at the TFS powertools? They have shell integration. What that means is that you can use Windows Explorer to manage TFS items that you have mapped in your workspace.

![alt text][1]
Visual Studio Power Tools | MSDN ->
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/c255a1e4-04ba-4f68-8f4e-cd473d6b971f
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/bb980963

For things that do not come with the shell integration you can build your own commands using TF.exe that is part of Visual Studio. If you use a tool to customize the context menu - something like File Menu Tools you can add these commands as context items on the file under TFS. e.g.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\TF.exe history [name-of-file] /recursive

http://www.lopesoft.com/en/fmtools/info.html

PM me if you need my File Menu Tools settings for the TF context menu extensions.

[1]: http://techoverflow.int.westgroup.com/upfiles/tmp_1.JPG

James Greene

If you are a fan of Git, you can use [git-tfs][1] to allow you to use standard Git workflows with TFS as your source control provider.

[1]: https://github.com/spraints/git-tfs

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