TFS – Free Text search in History Objects

It’s a best practice to add comment when you do check-in to the source control. A text comment is associated with the change you made to the item. Some of the times you need to find a particular comment, but the View History tool available with Visual Studio/TFS is limited that you can’t make a search in the history results. Say you want to find all check-ins by a particular user :(

History Tool in Visual Studio 2005

Here comes the purpose of this small add-in. It provides search within history comments and find a particular change-set instead of traversing the whole list. The plug-in goes one step forward and facilitates free text search in change-set fields. For example you can use change-set id, username or even date-time as search keywords!!!

The major steps involved in developing this add-in are:

  1. Writing an add-in for Visual Studio 2005,
  2. Getting file history from Team Foundation Server (TFS),
  3. Look for the selected item in the Visual Studio IDE,
  4. Free text search along with the tools to compare two files.

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