A few months ago I was constantly using Visual Studio 2008 with Team Foundation Server 2008. Searching for work items with queries inside Visual Studio became a pain until I found an add in that simplifed it into one little search box in the IDE.  It allowed me to enter some text in, hit the enter key, and it would bring back a list (aka open a .wiq file) of work items that matched the text entered. I became a huge fan of Noah Coad's Search Work Item Add In. He wrote a pretty good blog on how to use it as well.

Of course when we upgraded to Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010, the 2008 add in no longer worked. I didn't see any updates for it on codeplex to be 2010 compatible. Cory Cissell and I have published a few Visual Studio Extensions already so I figured I'd take a shot at making this tool 2010 compatible by turning it into an extension. Sure enough, it worked. We used it locally for a while and recently decided to publish it to the Visual Studio Gallery.

If you are currently looking for an easy way to search work items in Visual Studio 2010, this is worth checking out. Big thanks goes out to Noah for originally creating this on codeplex.

The extension we created can be downloaded here: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/3f31bfff-5ecb-4e05-8356-04815851b8e7

 * Additional note: The default search fields are Title, History, and Description. If you want to modify which work item fields are searchable, type in "--template" (no quotes) into the search box and hit enter. This will open the search template. Just add another "Or" statement, pick the field name, select an operator, type "[search]" (no quotes) in the value field, and hit ctrl + s to save. The next time you run a search it will use the modified search template.

That's all for now. Thanks!

- Mike