A few days ago, Telerik announced the availability of two new free products built to provide an informational view into your Team Foundation Server projects. These products are TFS Work Item Manager and TFS Project Dashboard.
TFS Work Item Manager highlights:
- Work Item grid filtering, grouping, and aggregation
- Area and Iteration filtering using single and multi select modes
- Filter query results using a tree of areas or iterations
- *Unique Task board view of work items independent from any process template
- Print work item cards for the board in your room
- Iteration schedule
- Paste clipboard contents into a work item
- "New Query by example” saves your query for other team members
- Search the title and description of query results as you type
- Built with RadControls for WPF
TFS Project Dashboard highlights:
- Displays workload data within various widgets
- Shows important indicators in real time, at a glance including:
- Build history
- Recent check-ins
- Assigned tasks
- Bug history
- More
The following TFS process templates are supported out of the box: CMMI Process Improvement, MSF for Agile Software Development, and Agile Software Development with Scrum. Custom process templates are also supported.
I have to admit that my current favorite feature of these tools is the Task Board view. This view represents your work items as “sticky notes” that you can drag from one status to another. In our case, we are projecting onto an interactive Panaboard which allows us to physically move a work item from one status into another by pointing and dragging with our fingers. Very cool!
If you’ve been looking for another view into the information buried within your Team Foundation Server then these tools are worth checking out.