I noticed on Rob Caron’s blog this morning a post entitled “Managing Version Control Workspaces”. This is a new freeware utility from Attrice that provides a GUI to manage your TFS Workspaces.

The download is a convenient 337Kb msi file and installation was as easy as double-clicking the TFSVCWS_1.0.0.24282.msi file and clicking next a few times. (Oh yeah, I always read all of these screens )

Once installed you start the application from the start menu like most other applications I guess.

When you start it up for the first time, you are prompted for a few pieces of information as shown in the following screen shots.

This was where I hit my first problem…. the site I am trialing this utility on is still using TFS Beta 3 Refresh while they wait for new hardware to move to RTM. The program stops with the following message. “Failed to initialize (Method not found: ‘System.String…’) error as shown below.

A quick flick over the my laptop and an RTM version of TFS gives me much better results. This is a fairly clean installation so there’s not that many workspaces to play around with. The main screen does exactly what the website states it should do and allows me to easily complete the following tasks from the UI;

• View workspaces filtered by specific owner or computer name (owner and/or computer name may be selected from list of Active Directory users or just typed in)
• Delete workspaces
• Update workspace computer name (for local workspaces only)
• View specific workspace details and folder mappings
• Delete specific workspace selected folder mappings
• Specify application configuration parameters (TFS server name, Active Directory domain for lookup)
• View log of performed actions (successful and failed)

In summary, this is a neat little utility that will definitely be added to my “TFS Utilities” start menu folder.