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Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1 Beta available

If you are a non-.NET developer and you are using Team Explorer Everywhere today or you are still hesitating to start using it, don’t wait any longer. With the upcoming release of Team Explorer Everywhere SP1, a long list of new features and improvements are added.

If you can not wait, just go the following link and download the latest bits: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=4449babd-1dc8-40e3-9e27-2b743a4a173c&displaylang=en. If you first want to learn about these new features, continue reading.

Gated Check-in Support

With SP1 Eclipse developers finally get the full experience of gated check-ins. When you check-in code affected by a gated build definition you get a prompt as to what you would like to do. Assuming you request a gated build, the changes will be shelved and a build submitted on your behalf.  When the build completes you will be notified right inside of Eclipse.

Private / Buddy Builds

Another new feature in the build space is the ability to create private builds from Eclipse.    If you want to perform a build on the build server then you can manually queue a build passing in a shelveset. That way you can validate your changes work on the build server before checking them in.

Rich Editing of Work Item Descriptions

In the new process templates that ship with TFS 2010 you can use HTML fields to provide a rich text field to enter information about that work item.  These are used extensively by the Microsoft Test Manager tool to help a tester create a bug with a nicely formatted repro steps.  In SP1 a rich HTML editing control for editing work items in Eclipse 3.5 is available. For developers using older versions of Eclipse we fall back to the HTML editing control that we shipped in original version.

Work Item Custom Controls

TFS has custom control support for work items both for Visual Studio and the web access. With Team Explorer Everywhere SP1 an improved experience is given to create custom controls for Eclipse. 

Internal Merge Support in Eclipse

In previous version of the Eclipse plug-in you were required to use an external tool to resolve merge conflicts.  Microsoft fixed this to properly support the internal merge tool if available in Eclipse including support for 3-way merging. 

And I even forgot to mention a lot of other new features, like localization, improved build results, and so on.

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