Team Foundation Power Toys saved my life!

…or at least, my Sanity!!

Anyone following my series about our efforts to build a custom process in TFS for our internal teams will know that I’ve begun by tackling the Work Item Type definitions first.

Without a decent GUI for doing this, it’s all XML, angle brackets, attributes and all…so, with 90+ fields, 13 states and 25+ transitions, theres a lot of cutting and pasting involved, to say nothing of the difficulties involved in managing a 1200 line long XML file in a glorified text editor.

However, for those like myself who are neck deep in the vagaries of the Work Item Type definition schema, help is at hand, for lo, Microsoft have released version 1.2 of the Team Foundation Power Toys. Big deal? Sure is, cos new in this release is a GUI ProcessTemplate editor. Having had a quick play so far with the Work Item editors, it looks to be something of a saviour for me at least. Gone is the endless cut-and-paste routine, replaced with a nice (? better than xml at least…) gui editor.

No more continual making a change, importing to a team project, and checking form layout, as it also includes a form “preview” in the editor.

And it’s even got a (DSL?) designer for defining workflow!!

Nice one! On a final note though, I had a bit of a laugh at the “Microsoft Pre-release Software License Terms” that governs this editor….it states “This software is a pre-release version. It may not work the way a final version of the software will. We may change it for the final, commercial version. We also may not release a commercial version.” and also “The term of this agreement is until 31 December 2008, or commercial release of the software, whichever is first.”….so, it might be released commercially, it might not…and if it is, it might be available before the end of 2008, or it might not. Oh, and if it’s not, then your license will expire anyway.

Last time I read a license agreement! J