Team Foundation Server Power Tools released

The Team Foundation Server power tools package has been released.

 It includes the command line tool, tfpt.exe, that has a bunch of commands that help you with source control operations, and workitem operations.

The package includes several checkin policies for source code control, some interesting stuff here. For example, the "forbidden files" policy prevents the checkin of files that should not form part of the source control structure, usually these files are the outputs of a compile operation of some sort. In a recent project I was involved in, the class libraries that a number of web projects were referencing often got included in the checkin of the web project - the stuff that went into the BIN folder essentially. And it broke the project reference in the web project and made it a file reference instead. It was frequently ugly, and required regular cleanups to get the projects back to normal, and it was usually caused by developers who didn't know better and were doing this accidentally.

There's also a TestToolsTask for giving you a bit more flexibility in a Build process for executing tests. That looks like it could be quite useful as well.  

Also in the package is the Process Template Editor for editing Team System process templates. Imaginet originally created this tool as a standalone utility, and Microsoft has taken it the next step by integrating it into Visual Studio. Joel Semeniuk had the vision, and a fellow developer at Imaginet, Ben Gan, did most of the coding.