Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools are now available for download. The Power Tools went live on the Microsoft Download Center at the end of the past week, with Microsoft having slipped past the initially intended release date. Still, the release is labeled October 2008, even though the bits went live in November. Brian Harry, Microsoft Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation Server, revealed that the delay was caused by the need to fix some last minute issues reported by the MVPs testing the Power Tools.

“We had originally planned to release them about two weeks ago but an early release to our MVP showed us that we still had work left to do to really get it ready,” Harry stated. “We think the release is in pretty good shape but (...) this is a very big and very broad release. As such we are expecting to have to do some mop up work in the next update. At this point I'm expecting that to happen in late Jan or early Feb.”

According to Microsoft, the Power Tools are designed to deliver a collection of enhancements, tools and command line utilities to kick Team Foundation Server up a notch. The Redmond company revealed the following list of components for the Power Tools: Command line tool (TFPT.EXE); Team Explorer IDE menu additions; Build Notification tool; TFS Best Practices Analyzer; Process Template Editor; Work Item Templates; Custom check-in policies; TFS Server Manager; TFS Users tool; Alert Editor; TFS Power Shell Extensions; TFS Windows Shell Extensions; and the Team Members Tool.

“The new setup now installs for 'all users' rather than just the current user,” Harry added. “This was necessary because the Windows Shell Extension can only be installed for 'all users'. That's not really an improvement, just a change :) The improvement is that the setup will now automatically uninstall previous Power Tool versions (including Dec '07, Mar '08 and Jul '08). This will eliminate one step when updating your Power Tools builds. One complication comes with the change to 'all users' install.”

Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server Power Tools - October 2008 Release is available for download here.