Team System: basic power tool tools

For a long time, Microsoft has added value to the products that users have purchased by introducing new features to the products that have been released. Many teams have published such enhancements in the name of Power Toy.

The first power Toy version comes from the Windows team responsible for windows®95 (for more information, see Raymond Chen's blog, the URL is blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/02/0 2/365432.aspx). Other teams follow suit, including the Visual Studio®team System (VSTS) team. It must be explained that I found that many of the tools in this batch of tools released by the VSTS team are essential, unlike many of the Power Toy released by other Microsoft teams.

In this column, I'll give you a brief overview of the main tools available now, and a detailed explanation of the tools that I think you should actually download and use. Since many of the tools I want to introduce are included in VSTS 2005, it focuses on the current release version of the VSTS 2008 tool.

Team System Web Access

The first download in your download list should be the VSTS Web Access 2008 Power Tool (go.microsoft.com/fwlink/? linkid=120834). Team System Web Access (TSWA) provides you with a rich web-based access mechanism for installing Team Foundation Server (TFS), as shown in Figure 1. With TSWA, you can manage work items and versions, view and run reports, access sharepoint® document libraries, and view source files under version control. Microsoft purchased the tool in March 2007 and added it to a set of available tools.

Figure 1 Team System Web Access