Implement indexed full-text search of work items, check-in comments and source
TFS stores a tremendous amount of text, but finding what you are looking for with the built-in tools is not very easy. The work item query editor follows the old structured approach - which is good for some things - but is clumsy for full-text, unstructured searches. Check-in comments are even more problematic.
Imagine a search engine that crawls the full TFS content, with simple scoping (project/folder and item type) that instantly finds changesets, work items and source code. The web frontent should have a very familiar "web search engine" style, but it should also be possible to perform these searches in a more integrated fashion from VS.
Visual Studio ALM Team
shared this idea
Thanks for the feedback. The web access site for TFS 2010 features a search box for work items. The work item search box has been added into the product for the next version of Visual Studio. As BertrandH notes, there’s a third party plug-in that adds a search box for work items to VS 2010. Our official powertools for VS 2010 also recently released with a work item search box added in: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/c255a1e4-04ba-4f68-8f4e-cd473d6b971f.
We continue to look into a comprehensive search solution for all artifacts in TFS besides just work items.
6 comments
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Matthew Mitrik
commented
There is an existing suggestion for adding search capabilities to TFS. I suggest voting on that issue: http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2037649-implement-indexed-full-text-search-of-work-items-
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Chris Lee
commented
This all-encompassing search should work like Resharper's find functionality, or even Windows 8's search functionality. That's been designed well
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flora
commented
According to Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_issue_tracking_systems#Features, TFS lacks Full-Text-search, Indexed-Full Text search and Indexed-file search.
I guess the entire artifact-wide and index-based search would cover those areas.
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Gert
commented
http://tfsgiggle.codeplex.com is a proof of concept on one way to do it using Lucene.Net
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BertrandH
commented
In case people some people not aware, there is a plug-in on Galery that helps a little: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/3f31bfff-5ecb-4e05-8356-04815851b8e7
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Paul Wistrand
commented
This would be one of my pet hates about TFS. Overtime it becomes increasingly had to find tasks/bugs that you remember working on 6,12,18+ months ago. I remember a 3rd party company ,that MS acquired, that had a web front end onto TFS that gave you FTI search not sure whatever happened to that functionality.
