I suppose I should come clean about something. I recently installed the Team Foundation Server PowerTools and have been using them successfully for a while. They have one or two very handy features that make TFS suck less. Get them direct from the TFS PowerTools page at MSDN.

Online Mode

Using the tfpt.exe command line, the 'online' mode will search your repository for changed files, added files and removed files and check out, add or remove the files as necessary. It also has a simple preview mode. This means that, with only one extra step, you can fix all the missing icons or forgotten checkouts or whatever. It would be nice not to have to do this step at all, but at least it's not entirely manual now.

Annotation

The PowerTools add a new feature to the Source Control Explorer: Annotation! Now you can actually see, line by line, who changed what, why and when. Jolly good.

Recursive Diff

Probably the biggest, most important change is the ability to diff entire directory trees. This will show you a nice window with all the missing files, all the changes, all the things that have not been checked out but should have, and everything else all in one lovely window. This alone is worth installing the PowerTools for.

Unchanged File Undo

A problem that arises from the 'check out required' nature of TFS is that sometimes Visual Studio checks things out automatically that are then never edited. When you check in, the files haven't changed so are not included in the changeset. This means you have a bunch of unchanged files marked as checked out. Very annoying.

Enter the tfpt.exe command line tool, with its 'uu' command. I assume that 'uu' stands for 'undo unchanged' or something. It basically performs an 'undo' on any checked out files that haven't actually changed since being checked out.