Introducing the v1.0 Power Toys for Visual Studio - Shared Source Releases

Today we released our first three power toys as Shared Source, collaborative-development projects.  You can find them at their new home at https://www.codeplex.com.  For more info about CodePlex, I’ll refer to Jim’s blog,

Over 13 months ago (April 4, 2005 in fact) I posted something on my blog that I was leaving the patterns & practices team. Since that time we assembled a team of people and in turn built a community site for developers to innovate and participate in collaborative development projects. The web-site launched last Thursday, May 11, 2006 and is currently in beta. I encourage you to check out the site at https://codeplex.com .

Each project has the following documentation included in the source code Doc folder.

• Readme – the basic documentation of the tool.  Included in the release download.
• Design Doc – the developer’s design doc for the tool.  
• Test Plan – the test plan that goes over how what scenarios to test and how to run the build and test scripts. 

Each project also has the following build and tests scripts found in the source code Verification Scripts folder

• Build.cmd – verifies your modifications to the source code still builds successfully
• RunTests.cmd – runs the associated unit and scenario tests

And now, here are our new members of the Power Toys for Visual Studio Collection.

MSBee

MSBee is an addition to MSBuild that allows developers to build managed applications in Visual Studio 2005 that target .NET 1.1.

• Homepage
• Releases
• Source Code
• Work Items / Bug Reports

Team Foundation Server Administration Tool

TFS Admin Tool allows a Team Foundation Server administrator to quickly add and modify user permissions to all three platforms utilized by TFS

• Homepage
• Releases
• Source Code
• Work Items / Bug Reports

Managed Stack Explorer

MSE is a lightweight tool that provides a quick and easy way to monitor .NET 2.0 managed processes and their stacks.

• Homepage
• Releases
• Source Code
• Work Items / Bug Reports

There are several ways for you to participate in the community.  You can do so by

1. Blogging what you think about the tools
2. Submitting bug reports and feature suggestions for any of the tools
3. Asking and answering questions on our power toys forums
4. Checking in bug fixes and new features

I’ll have more info on how to check in a bug fix or a new feature in a couple of days.  If you can’t wait until then to get started, email me and I’ll be very happy to set you up in the meantime =)

Oh, and we’re still hiring, so if you like what you see, ping Josh.

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 16, 2006
  You can now get the source code to your cell phone.
  Someday you might probably be able to get the source...