Team Foundation Sidekicks

Team Foundation Sidekicks provide some invaluable query tools for TFS. Here are the two most important Sidekicks provided.

Workspace Sidekick

See how many workplaces you have, who owns them and when they were last accessed.

Delete Workspace
Figure: Lets you delete old workspaces

Status Sidekick

Lets you see all checked out files.

Avoid Losing Code
Figure: Find the oldest checked out files so you don't lose code

Visual Build Professional

Visual Build Pro is an automated build program suitable for use on .NET projects. Automated scripts can be created to the complete build process including covering:

  • SourceSafe Get Latest
  • Compiling
  • Unit Tests
  • Code Auditor
  • FxCop
  • Wise (to build MSIs and Setup.exes)
  • Deployment via fileshare or FTP
Visual Build Professional
Figure: Visual Build Professional

Learn more about Visual Build Professional.

We currently recommend Visual Build Pro for automating setup and deployments, but for future projects we will use MS Build and eventually we will see MS Build being the recommended solution to automating deployments.

Acknowledgements

Adam Cogan
Martin Hinshelwood