TeamPlain v2.0 is unleashed

You may recall that Microsoft purchased TeamPlain v1.0 from DevBiz Solutions earlier this year. This is the web based front end to the Microsoft Team Foundation Server. It's much simpler and easier to use that the Team Explorer that comes with Visual Studio. And it relieves end users from having to install Visual Studio to interact with a TFS project. DevBiz was in the middle of v2.0 when they were purchased. Since this, all has been quiet.

Until now.

Microsoft announced a rebranding of TeamPlain as the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Web Access "power tool". Nothing a really catchy name like TeamPlain. Hopefully this is just a placeholder until Microsoft marketing comes up with something more original. But the feature set in the new version of "TeamPlain" is substantial.

I particularly liked the performance improvements from its new Ajax-style interface, bulk editing of work items (wow, was this needed!), a revamped work item interface, and a better way of showing reports (in separate windows). But this just scratches the surface of all of the changes.

Installation (and upgrading from v1.0) was a snap. The only glitch we discovered is that the default installation path is so long, it can interfere with the ability to interact with Source Control. Basically, the path is too long (beyond 256), and it croaks. Hopefully Microsoft will remedy this by defaulting to a smaller path at installation. We had to un-install and re-install the PowerTool to a smaller path to resolve the issue.

All in all it's an outstanding release and nice to see Microsoft is actively supporting TeamPlain moving forward. A web-based interface to TFS has been sorely lacking from Microsoft and a surprising oversight on their part up to now. But the wait's been worth it.

Posted by Mark M. Baker at 02:57 PM  Permalink