Grant Holliday

Buck Hodges’ talks about the Team Foundation Power Toy – Annotate utility (tfpt.exe annotate) which is available in the Visual Studio 2005 SDK.

It includes a small windows forms app that allows you to download a file from your TFS source repository and view the user who committed each line and the associated changeset/date.

The powertoy contains a “/noprompt” switch for outputting to the console but it doesn’t output the code author or date, so I adapted it so that the GUI isn’t neccessary and you can use tfsblame.exe as a console-only application with code author.

An idea we had internally was to pick a random file out of the repository, annotate it and email it around the developer team. Nothing is better for code than a code review!

Usage

tfsblame.exe <server> <filespec>e.g. tfsblame.exe http://server:8080 "$/Team Project/Solution/Project/File.cs"

Download

Download v1.0 Source and Binary from my TFS Blame workspace on ProjectDistributor.

Also available

Within the download, there is also a Web Application Project called TfsBlameWeb for exposing this functionality as a website.