Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 SP1 (Beta)

Yesterday we released the beta of the first service pack of Team Explorer Everywhere, and while a service pack is just supposed to be a roll-up of bugfixes, we managed to sneak in some great new features.

I mentioned before that Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 was sort of a tough release for us... fortunately we got a second chance with our service pack and we were able to add some new features that we didn't have time to include for the initial release.

We were able to add Gated Check-in, which is a great feature for bringing your continuous integration up a notch to ensure that your code quality stays high. This was one of the flagship features of TFS 2010 and something we use internally, so it was especially important for us to provide it to our customers.

We added support for conflict resolution using the built-in Eclipse Merge Tool. While we've always had the ability to use an external merge tool like SourceGear DiffMerge, we'd never investigated using the internal Eclipse compare/merge tool to resolve a conflict. In SP1, we're going to add that as the Eclipse merge tool as a resolution option so that you don't need to install a 3rd party tool.

Finally - and perhaps most visibly - we've added rich text editing for Work Items, which will allow you to easily edit the rich text in HTML field controls in work items. (Previously we provided a poorer experience with HTML in controls.) In SP1, we're able to leverage the web browsers on each platform to render a nice rich text editor.

Of course, we've also been busy fixing a bunch of bugs. We're really pleased with the way our first service pack has come together, and we think that this is a release that you'll be very happy with.