How often do you search your development machine for code you developed before? Very often, right? And how often do you look for code on the web? Also very often, I assume. Search in Vista (or Windows Server 2008) are very powerful and so are the known search engines on the web.
So what if you wanted code that other people in your organisation created? That is where you can use Microsoft Search Server!
Search Server is based on Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 and has very simple yet powerful additions to search various content sources such as websites and file shares. To get started with searching the source code in your Team Foundation Server:
- Install Search Server
- Create a file share on a server
- Get the latest version of your TFS version control to the file share
- In Search Server Central Administration create a new content source and point it to the file share
- Add new file types, of files you want to search such as .cs, to the content index
- Start a full crawl on the content source
Now you are ready to go: Open the search page and enter something to search for such as "Page_Load". On the result page you will get links to the files in which your search string was found. Nice, right?
So next there can be loads of additions: You can create an integrated search within Visual Studio, apply effective TFS permissions, make search results open in Visual Studio, etc.