I am a simple man. All I ever wanted was drag and drop for source control. That folder chooser dialog was a bear. Now we will get it with Visual Studio 2008 SP1. Thank goodness. From the web site:

• Simplified the user experience through cleaner "Add to Source Control" dialogs, drag and drop support to the Source Control Explorer and a much easier to use "Workspace" dialog for working folder mappings.
• Version control now automatically supports non-solution controlled files.
• Various changes to the Source Control Explorer such as a new checkin date/time display column, local path hyperlink support and en editable source location field.

I am not a big fan of installing a beta SP on may dev laptop, but I gotta tell ya, I did it for that feature alone.

Sela has created a great little plug-in to VS 2005 that will warn you when you're doing a check-out if there are later revisions of any of those files on the TFS server.  Download it here.

1. Customer - "Your stupid app lost all my contact data!"
2. Help Desk - "Maybe I can help.  Go to Help -> Analyze"
3. Customer - "OK.  I see this list of green and red dots with text."
4. Help Desk - "Can you read me the line next to the first red dot?"
5. Customer - "It says 'Can't find database at C:\myapp\contacts.mdb'"
6. Help Desk - "Hmm...  Can you browse to that directory?"
7. Customer - "No, I deleted it to have room for more mp3's"
8. Help Desk - "Oh...  That's a file required for our app to run.  Did you subscribe to our backup service?"
9. Customer - "Yes."
10. Help Desk "Good, go to Tools -> Options -> Restore Contact..."

You get the idea.  It rocks for troubleshooting those pesky support calls from customers.  For a lot more information, and a very nice screenshot, see Adam Cogan's original posting on this topic!  You can find the specific recommendation in his menu unit tests best practice. (While you're there, check out the rest of his best practices, he has a huge number of great ideas.)

Unfortunately, you cannot ship your Team System unit tests with your application.  I know there's an NUnit to VSTS Unit Test converter.  Does anyone know if VSTS Unit Tests can be converted to NUnit or MbUnit unit tests, so that all of us using VSTS Unit Tests can implement this best practice?

UPDATE:  Adam Cogan claims he got the idea from James Newkirk (of NUnit fame).  That may be the case, but I'll have to credit Adam.  :-) He's got so many best practices on his site (see this rule that covers shipping unit tests for an example) that if he didn't get the idea from Newkirk, he likely would have thought of it himself!

UPDATE TWO:  This IS Adam's idea!  James simply wanted a distributable test harness for developers to use!  I misunderstood his first comment to me!  (By the way, if you have comments on this post, or any other, please send email to steve+comments[at]accentient.com.  We've had to disable comments until we find a way to more effectively eliminate comment spam.)

Here's a great tool for agile development that was mentioned in a blog post below.  Go get a stack of these!  Shuffle them, pass them around, put your use stories on them, and slap them up on the board when you're ready!  Here's one more link.

Post-it® Sortable Cards only stick when you want them to! Now you have the flexibility to visualize and organize when and how you want on many different surfaces. Cards also easily sort, shuffle and stack together so you can use them again, or store them for later.

Here's the install script for TFS, both Dual and Single server install.  Thanks to Etienne Tremblay (VSTS MVP) for all his hard work in putting this together, and updating it for SQL Server 2005 SP1.  

The best tool is the simplest.  It shouldn't get in the way of doing things, and it should be incredibly easy.  One of my favorite Agile dev tools is the digital camera.  Simply snap a quick photo of your whiteboard and you've got a good replacement for a $10,000 whiteboard with print / scan capabilities.  Plus, you then have it in digital format!  No need for scanning.

The problem is that you have flash reflections, etc, and that makes the image harder to read.  You need to do some image manipulation to really make it easy to read and understand.  And it should be in TIF or PDF format if you want to do OCR.  So, head to www.scanr.com  This great little web site takes a digital photo of a white board, and converts it to a very nice PDF document.  It eliminates most of the flash, rotates the image if you've taken a photo of the white board from the side, and saves it as a nice, high-quality PDF.  Check it out!

I just found Protolize.  It's a great resource for web development - everything from Ajax to XHTML.  It's basically a collection of pointers (done very nicely) to various web resources.  Very nice!

Brian Harry has just posted a great Word doc that gives a few ins and outs when building extensions to Team Foundation Server.  It's focused on the Version Control side of the house, but many of the recommendations work for automating Work Item access as well.  Head over to the blog post (here), and download the Advice for developing TFS client applications.doc document.  If you build TFS extensions, it's definitely required reading!  :-)

If you're building a web site that needs to be viewed in multiple different browsers, it has been difficult in the past to really get a good test.  No longer.  A site called BrowserShots.org provides a way to view screenshots of a web page as seen from over 30 different types of browsers.  They actually run the site in the browser, take a screenshot, and post it.  Pretty amazing!  Here's a list of the browsers and options you can choose from.  Color me impressed!

Microsoft will be releasing an Express version of their XNA development environment free!  :-)  That means that folks like you and I can create our applications for the XBox 360 (and, simultaneously for Windows) much more easily!  That is cool!  I expect a development community to spring up with free games, trial games, and all sorts of non-game applications as well.  Fun!  You can read more about it here.

One of the main sticking points with many people is the lack of integration between Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) and Microsoft Project Server.  Sure, you can indirectly connect the two through a MS Project file, and there's some light integration there.  But most people want to use VSTS as part of a complete lifecycle management too... and that means tracking resources across multiple projects, and many across several organizational stovepipes.  That's where MS Project Server comes in. 

In the future, Microsoft will likely do a great deal of integration between the two, but for right now you'll need to download the Project Server Visual Studio Team System Connector.  I haven't used it yet, but am planning on taking a look at it once it's been upgraded to support either TFS RC or TFS RTM.  I'll let you know!

Every now and then I REALLY need to replace some text with some other text in a whole series of directories.  This is especially true when working with MOC course, with LOTS of references to a server name in all sorts of solutions. 

There's a GREAT tool that does simple search and replace, through any number or type of files, regardless of directory depth called ReplaceEm.  And, it's FREE!  The developer just wants you think of FitSoftware when you need some software development done.  Download it here.

My good friend, business partner and coblogger, Rich Hundhausen posted this a while back.  I just had a need for it, and LOVE the work that Christopher Bowen did putting this list together.  It's a list of all the tools, both open source and not, that are impacted (positively or negatively) by the release of Visual Studio 2005 Team System.  You can find the link here.

I posted earlier that I had installed X1, the fantastic (if expensive) desktop search on an earlier OS install, and that I loved it.  Well, Yahoo! has licensed it, and it's available for free download at http://desktop.yahoo.com/.  I installed the free version, and LOVE it!  Like X1, it handily beats Lookout and Google Desktop.  I highly recommend it!  By the way, if you ever search emails using the internal Outlook search, or search for files on your hard drive, you NEED a tool!  And this one is the best I've found.  A great review of Yahoo! Desktop Search can be found here.