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Visual Studio Tools

  1. Team Foundation Sidekicks
  2. Visual Build Professional

Do you agree with them all? Are we missing some? Let us know what you think.

would you like your software to be considered for this list? Give us your details.

  1. 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

  2. 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
    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