Microsoft recently updated their Team Foundation Server Power Tools to have a work item search box!
A few months back Brian Harry (MS Technical Fellow and Program Unit Manager of TFS) asked me if he could include my Search Work Items VS addin in the TFS Power Tools. It’s awesome seeing it here now!
A little back story… I originally created the addin while we were working on VS 2008. I had heard the passion our head of Team System at the time Andrew Kass talk about the need for providing some level of work item search. It wasn’t something our VSTS team was able implement in a more fully supported way at the time. So that evening in about two hours I coded up this little vs addin and put it up on MSDN. It was the #1 download for about a month and has continued to be popular. Thanks to the community on CodePlex others have kept it up to date.
Differences… now I will say that my addin does have a few differences
- Ability to edit what field are being searched on. Typing “—template” will open the work item query used
- Jumps directly to a work item if a number is specified, like 993. Team Explorer already has a feature for that in Go To Work Item (Ctrl+G) so that’s not really important, but I put it in so there was was a visual way to click and type a work item number to jump to
- The Search Work Items box also shows up in the “Team” main menu so if you don’t like toolbars (I turn mine all off), then you can still find it
- An finally, the addin has a registered VS Command, Team.SearchWorkItems, so you can assign a keyboard shortcut to jump to the box (I use Ctrl+Alt+S)
References
- Team Foundation Server Power Tools December 2011 Update
- Search Work Items for VS2010 in the Visual Studio Gallery
- Search Work Items source code home on CodePlex
- Original blog post from when Search Work Items was released
In conclusion, a big thanks goes out to the TFS team for asking me and putting the feature into the MS sponsored Power Tools package. I hope more TFS users are able to be more productive because of it. :)
