Just Published: TFS Solution Info - Visual Studio Extension

The Problem

I deal with Team Foundation Server (TFS) a lot day to day, so I occasionally find myself wondering which Branch and/or Workspace I happen to have open on my project at any given time.  For some people, this is not a problem, since they work on one particular branch, do their work and then check in.  For me, though, it’s different.
I do parallel development on my project.  Sometimes I’m working on a great new feature for 2.0 while switching over to a HotFix branch to do a quick patch for the 1.5 version that’s in Production.
I also use a separate workspace in TFS to Merge and deploy code.  Throw in the “Experimental” Workspace I use to play around in various versions of the code, and you can see why I frequently get lost.

The Solution

(no pun intended! -- OK, I confess: It was totally intended!)
Banking on the theory that I’m not alone in this – and, based on my coworker feedback, I’m not – I decided to publish the Visual Studio plugin I created.
For lack of a better name, I called it “TFS Solution Info”
Here’s what it looks like



It’s pretty simple.  Using the Visual Studio SDK, I connected up to Solution events and TFS-related information to display information about the currently loaded Solution.

I can’t believe how useful this has been for me.  I hope it’s useful for you too!

Get TFS Solution Info from the Visual Studio Gallery!

Or, you can just search for “TFS Solution Info” in the Visual Studio Extension Manager.  The code will be posted up on Codeplex very soon.

Let me know what you would like to see this do.

[Update: just updated the formatting]