Team Foundation Power Tools

I use Visual Studio 2008 with Team foundation Server for all our projects. This includes .NET and BI based projects. Team Foundation Server is a very nice tool which allows for very good source control of the code base. One of my collegaues gave me an insight into the Team Foundation Power tools. This is really a cool tool and helps out immensely when you are working as part of a development team. Prior to installing this tool, the Visual Studio 2008 has to be complety closed down. Once the Power Tool is installed, open up Visual Studio and launch The team explorer. Once the team explorer comes up, it will list the team projects, within the team projects folder, there is a folder called team members. Once you expand the folders it will list the team members who are online/offline. One can righ click on the team meber, you will get the following options like: Show Check in history, Show Pending Changes and Show Shelvesets. The neat thing about this feature one can resolve any conflicts in Check in/out, get information of the pending changes which are going to be rolled into the codebase. There is an another feature called alerts which has different calssifications, where by one can get alerts. Here is a a list of events for which alerts can be setup. In a nutshell the Team Foundation Power Tools provided features to mange projects and builds effectively.