TFS Phone Explorer. Another TFS client for WP7

 

When only I few days ago I wrote TFS and Windows Phone 7 I was far from guessing that only a few days later I would be writing again about this topic. So this should be probably title TFS and Windows Phone 7 II, but I don’t want to take a chance of writing a third series so I’m not using another title.

Black Marble just released on WP7 Marketplace TFS Phone Explorer.

The name is a bit misleading (probably because they may have greater plans for future versions ).

For now it’s mainly a build monitor, it allows you to see the builds on your server. Given a build you can do two things. Queue another build (great feature) and see the detail of a build (this opens a full chest of options). You can see detailed information about the build (time taken, the person who queued,etc,etc) the (number) of tests (passed, failed and inconclusive), the compilation status (errors and warnings), the work items that have been associated with the build. Unfortunately the associated changesets are not available (perhaps this will be an incentive for people to use the best practice of associating work items with checkins ).

You can also see a work item detail and make changes to it (not all fields are shown and I’m still trying to understand how the app chooses the fields to be displayed)

You can also create work items, which can be a great feature if you are on the road and remembers something that needs to be entered as a workitem (it has happened to me and had to write it down on onenote since I have a terribly memory ).

In order to use this application on your own TFS you need to install a service (available from Black Marble)

I think this is a great V1 that has room for improvement. Specially if capability to see work items and changesets.

Something that I miss on this application (and TFS Monitor) is the lack of filtering, on a big TPC you can get be information overload pretty fast. But I’ve found this to be a common issue with WP7 apps since the Metro (I could be wrong since I haven’t read the spec ) UI doesn’t seem to have a way to filter information (other than using panorama for it).