Searching TFVC History by ChangeSet Comment

Team Foundation Power Tools 2015

I recent moved onto a new project that is using TFVC and also is using an old version of Visual Studio (2015). I was first tasked with updating an SDK in the solution and was told this was a very involved process. Yes, enterprise work is so exciting. As this was not a simple task like updating an NPM resource, I needed to reference similar changes made in the past. I needed to search TFVC History.

Out of the box, this is not very friendly, you get filename, changeset ID, changeset author and changeset date/time searching. Typical, the one thing that would be VERY helpful isn’t part of the ‘out of the box’ experience.

So I had to hunt down the installer for Team Foundation Power Tools, specifically the 2015 version. Once I downloaded and installed these tools, there are plenty of wonderful tools available. The one I would use is the tf searchcs command.

This opens a window that, when opened in your mapped workspace, will have the repository information already filled out, otherwise you need to do this. Since I was looking for changesets with “SDK” in them, I dropped that into the “comment contains” field and checked the box so that the search would include this, then hit ‘OK’.

BAM! The change sets that I was looking for turned up as easy as that. Another point for GIT and its full featured changeset search functionality!