What Add-Ons / Utilities are available for TFS?

Question

I'm interested in knowing what high quality and useful add-ons or utilities are available for TFS. They can be commercial or open source. Of particular interest are any tools allowing visualisation of branches and tracking changesets as they are merged across branches (yes I know that the next version of TFS will be better in this area). A lot of the lists of TFS add-ins I found via google are quite dated and link to non-existent / abandoned projects.

I'll start the ball rolling with two we've found very useful:

• TFS Branch History is an add-in for Visual Studio allows you to view the history of an item going back before the last branch
• TFS Power Tools is a collection of TFS utilities from Microsoft including a command line tool that provides several useful features

Answer 1

Team Foundation Sidekicks have been invaluable in keeping builds and merges in check.

Answer 2

• TFS Power Tools - collection of MS utilities has grown too large and too powerful to summarize here. Don't leave home without it!
• MSSCCI plugin (2005 link) - lets TFS work in a wide variety of IDEs that support the older MSSCCI [aka SourceSafe] standard, such as VB6, FoxPro, PowerBuilder, SQL Management Studio, etc
• TeamPrise ($$) - suite of TFS clients for Eclipse, Mac, Linux, mainframes (!), just about everything else that MS doesn't support natively
• TFS Sidekicks - suite of utilities was one of the very first 3rd party tools and continues to add features. Now supports UI queries on history, status, workspace, labels, shelvesets, permissions, team builds, and more -- much of it now integrated directly into VS.
• TFS Administration Tool - easily synchronize permissions between core TFS services, Sharepoint, and SQL Reporting Services
• Migration & Synchronization Toolkit - framework for migrating from other ALM systems to TFS, including support for ongoing 2-way synchronization
• SvnBridge - lets you use a SVN client against a TFS server, to appease the folks who just don't get it ;-)
• KDiff3 - best merge tool anywhere. See below for more options & instructions.
• TFS Code Review Workflow - just what it sounds like; uses shelvesets + work items + a checkin policy to formalize the code review process
• Conchango SCRUM template & task board - probably the most popular 3rd party Process Template, plus a ($$) dashboard product
• Source Server for TFS - get full source code indexing from your symbol server; now baked into the main WinDBG download, this link goes to a setup guide
• TeamLook ($$) - deep integration between Outlook and TFS work item tracking. Think JIRA on steroids, if you've ever used that product.
• TFS Work Item Manager and Dashboard - very slick WPF replacement for the work item features of Team Explorer, plus a dashboard that comes with lots of reports aimed at replacing the canned ones on the stock Team Project Portal. Still in beta but demos look promising
• Reporting Services Sample Pack - large collection of reports to run against the stock process template, or use as an example for writing custom ones
• Performance Report Pack - another report package, this time aimed at studying TFS performance
• MSBuild Extension Pack - make customizing your Team Builds somewhat less frustrating
• MSBuild Community Tasks - ditto
• MSBuild SideKick ($$) - IDE and debugger for Team Build scripts

Even more complete (but old) list: http://blogs.msdn.com/davidmcg/archive/2007/03/09/team-foundation-server-tools.aspx

List of merge tools + settings: http://blogs.msdn.com/jmanning/articles/535573.aspx

Some frequently requested checkin policies:

• "Custom Path", "Changeset Comments", "Forbidden Patterns", and "Work Item Query" policies are all part of the official Power Tools now
• Keyword expansion
• Branch/Merge only
• Source Analysis
• Build Status
• Time That Task

Answer 3

I created a tool that makes creating links between lots of work items easy. It also allows moving workitems between projects.

It can be found here: WI Assitant

Answer 4

I have found a TFS client "TFS Work Item manager" with cool features (for example: tree view, links to assigned work items) to sort and filter items and very helpfull visualisations (very good taskboard, dashboard).