Team Foundation Sidekicks for Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2013 is available!

This release functionality is identical to the previous version of Sidekicks for Visual Studio 2013, with support of TFS both on premise and in-the-cloud (Team Foundation Service).

Team Foundation Sidekicks for Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2012 is available!

This release functionality is mainly identical to the version of Sidekicks for Visual Studio 2010, with support of TFS both on premise and in-the-cloud (Team Foundation Service).

For 2012 we support both stand-alone client application and Visual Studio integration package; the latter uses VS 2012 extension registration mechanism and is available through VS Extensions Manager. Note that there are separate installations for stand-alone app and VS package.

As always, we would be happy to hear your feedback, so please feel free to comment on the blog or reach us at tfs_at_attrice_dot_info.

We have updated the Sidekicks to work with RC build of Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2010, the updated version can be downloaded here. The updated version have the same feature-set as described in the previous post.

For RTM, the plan is to update Sidekicks to expose additional functionality new to 2010; if you have any additional wishes now is the time for the feedback – drop us an email at tfs_at_attrice_dot_info.

MSBuild is powerful general purpose build engine, but what if you have a dedicated build server running Team Foundation Server Build? Did you know that you can execute Team Build projects locally and even debug them with MSBuild Sidekick? In this post we shall show how to do that in three simple steps (for Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2008).

Prior to debugging you need to know about several limitations desktop build has comparing to Team build running on the server. From MSDN article "How to: Build Team Projects on a Desktop":

• The desktop builds perform only the compilation and tests.
• They do not perform other public build steps such as getting sources from version control, updating work items, labeling sources, creating new work items, and copying to drop locations
• The default MSBuild logger logs the results because the Team Foundation Build logger is not enabled for desktop builds.
• The desktop builds do not store build data in the database.
• They do not generate any status reports. Build output is written to console. You can learn more details by enabling the Verbosity option when running the MSBuild command. For more information, see MSBuild Command Line Reference.

1. Follow the directions in the article to get you all prerequisites for building Team Build projects locally in order.

2. Open local copy of Team Build project file from previous step with MSBuild Sidekick and define TeamBuildRefPath property in "Project Properties" pane. To do so access "Build" -> "Build Options" menu item, and then click "Project Properties" icon at the left pane and add TeamBuildRefPath property with its value set to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\" (or different drive where you have VS 2008 installed).

Reload project by clicking "File" -> "Reload". A few warnings you still see do not affect further debugging.

3. Your Team Build project is now ready for debugging. You may start debugging by clicking Debug toolbar button or pressing F5 key.

You can learn more about debugging and how to use it efficiently from our previous posts “How to debug step-by-step with MSBuild Sidekick” and “How to review Properties & Items while debugging with MSBuild Sidekick”.

As year 2010 rolls in, Team Foundation Sidekicks for Beta 2 release candidate of Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2010 is available!

The release functionality is mainly identical to that of version 2.4 for 2005/2008, with the exception of the following:
Permissions Sidekick: Sidekick is not available in this release (to be added back in 2010 RTM timeframe)
Build Type editing (VS integration only): The feature is not available in this release
Dynamic History support (VS integration only): the History toolwindow is updated only when it is visible alongside with Source Control Explorer and single instance of the window exists (in 2010 History toolwindow may have multiple instances)

For 2010 we still supply both stand-alone client application and Visual Studio integration package; the latter uses VS 2010 extension registration mechanism and is now available through VS Extensions Manager.

Please note that since object model API for 2010 release is still being finalized, we did not include any new features in the release for beta 2, relying instead on API backward compatibility (on which TFS team did an excellent job allowing us to provide same features as in 2008 with minimum changes). But we do plan on supporting TFS 2010 new features in our utilities; if you feel strongly about any features or want to provide other feedback, feel free to comment on the blog or reach us at tfs_at_attrice_dot_info.