Find in Files Search all code in Team Foundation Server

Question

Is there a way to search the latest version of every file in TFS for a specific string or regex  This is probably the only thing I miss from Visual Source Safe       Currently I perform a Get Latest on the entire codebase and use Windows Search  but this gets quite painful with over 1GB of code in 75 000 files     EDIT  Tried the powertools mentioned  but the  Wildcard Search  option appears to only search filenames and not contents   UPDATE  We have implemented a customised search option in an existing MOSS  Search Server  installation

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If you install TFS 2008 PowerTools you will get a  Find in Source Control  action in the Team Explorer right click menu   TFS2008 Power Tools

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Team Foundation Server 2015  on-premises  and Visual Studio Team Services  cloud version  include built-in support for searching across all your code and work items   You can do simple string searches like foo  boolean operations like foo OR bar or more complex language-specific things like class WebRequest    You can read more about it here  https   www visualstudio com en-us docs search overview

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Another solution is to use  ctrl shift F    You can change the search location to a local directory rather than a solution or project   This will just take the place of the desktop search and you ll still need to get the latest code  but it will allow you to remain within Visual Studio to do your searching

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There is currently no way to do this out of the box  but there is a User Voice suggestion for adding it  http   visualstudio uservoice com forums 121579-visual-studio suggestions 2037649-implement-indexed-full-text-search-of-work-items   While I doubt it is as simple as flipping a switch  if everyone that has viewed this question voted for it  MS would probably implement something   Update  Just read Brian Harry s blog  which shows this request as being on their radar  and the Online version of Visual Studio has limited support for searching where git is used as the vcs  http   blogs msdn com b visualstudioalm archive 2015 02 13 announcing-limited-preview-for-visual-studio-online-code-search aspx   From this I think it s fair to say it is just a matter of time     Update 2  There is now a Microsoft provided extension Code Search which enables searching in code as well as in work items

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Okay    TFS2008 Power Tools do not have a find-in-files function   The Find in Source Control tools provide the ability to locate files and folders in source control by the item   s status or with a wildcard expression   There is a Windows program with this functionality posted on CodePlex  I just installed and tested this and it works well

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There is another alternative solution  that seems to be more attractive    Setup a search server - could be any windows machine server Setup a TFS notification service   Bissubscribe  to get  delete  update files everytime a checkin happens  So this is a web service that acts like a listener on the TFS server  and updates syncs the files and folders on the Search server  - this will dramatically improve the accuracy  live search   and avoid the one-time load of making periodic gets Setup an indexing service windows indexed search on the Search server for the root folder Expose a web service to return search results   Now with all the above setup  you have a few options for the client    Setup a web page to call the search service and format the results to show on the webpage - you can also integrate this webpage inside visual studio  through a macro or a add-in  Create a windows client interface winforms wpf  to call the search service and format the results and show them on the UI - you can also integrate this client tool inside visual studio via VSPackages or add-in   Update  I did go this route  and it has been working nicely  Just wanted to add to this   Reference links    Use this tool instead of bissubscribe exe Handling TFS events Team System Notifications

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This add-in claims to have the functionality that I believe you seek   Team Foundation Sidekicks

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This search for a file link explains how to find a file   I did have to muck around with the advice to make it work    cd  C  Program Files  x86  Microsoft Visual Studio 12 0 Common7 IDE  tf dir      sql   recursive  server http   mytfsserver 8080 tfs   In the case of the cd command  I performed the cd command because I was looking for the tf exe file   It was easier to just start from that directory verses adding the whole path   Now that I understand how to make this work  I d use the absolute path in quotes   In case of the tf search  I started at the root of the server with    and I searched for all files that ended with sql i e    sql   If you don t want to start at the root  then use    myproject   sql  instead   Oh  This does not solve the search in file part of the question but my Google search brought me here to find files among other links

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In my case  writing a small utility in C  helped  Links that helped me - http   pascallaurin42 blogspot com 2012 05 tfs-queries-searching-in-all-files-of html  How to list files of a team project using tfs api   using System  using System Collections Generic  using System Linq  using System Text  using Microsoft TeamFoundation Client  using Microsoft TeamFoundation VersionControl Client  using Microsoft TeamFoundation Framework Client  using System IO   namespace TFSSearch   class Program       static string   textPatterns   new      void main     exception    RegisterScript        Text to search     static string   filePatterns   new        cs      xml      config      asp      aspx      js      htm      html                                                  vb      asax      ashx      asmx      ascx      master      svc      file extensions      static void Main string   args                try                       var tfs   TfsTeamProjectCollectionFactory               GetTeamProjectCollection new Uri  http    tfsserver  8080 tfs          one some servers you also need to add collection path  if it not the default collection               tfs EnsureAuthenticated                 var versionControl   tfs GetService lt VersionControlServer gt                   StreamWriter outputFile   new StreamWriter   C  Find txt                var allProjs   versionControl GetAllTeamProjects true               foreach  var teamProj in allProjs                                foreach  var filePattern in filePatterns                                        var items   versionControl GetItems teamProj ServerItem         filePattern  RecursionType Full  Items                                  Where i   gt   i ServerItem Contains   ReSharper        skipping resharper stuff                     foreach  var item in items                                                List lt string gt  lines   SearchInFile item                           if  lines Count  gt  0                                                        outputFile WriteLine  FILE     item ServerItem                               outputFile WriteLine lines Count ToString       occurence s  found                                 outputFile WriteLine                                                      foreach  string line in lines                                                        outputFile WriteLine line                                                     if  lines Count  gt  0                                                        outputFile WriteLine                                                                                      outputFile Flush                                    catch  Exception e                        string ex   e Message              Console WriteLine    EXCEPTION      e Message               Console WriteLine  Continuing                          Console WriteLine                      Console Read                  Define other methods and classes here     private static List lt string gt  SearchInFile Item file                var result   new List lt string gt              try                       var stream   new StreamReader file DownloadFile    Encoding Default                var line   stream ReadLine                var lineIndex   0               while   stream EndOfStream                                if  textPatterns Any p   gt  line IndexOf p  StringComparison OrdinalIgnoreCase   gt   0                       result Add      Line     lineIndex          line Trim                      line   stream ReadLine                    lineIndex                                    catch  Exception e                        string ex   e Message              Console WriteLine    EXCEPTION      e Message               Console WriteLine  Continuing                           return result

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We have set up a solution for Team Foundation Server Source Control  not SourceSafe as you mention  similar to what Grant suggests  scheduled TF Get  Search Server Express  However the IFilter used for C  files  text  was not giving the results we wanted  so we convert source files to  htm files  We can now add additional meta-data to the files such as    Author  we define it as the person that last checked in the file  Color coding  on our todo-list  Number of changes indicating potential design problems  on our todo-list  Integrate with the VSTS IDE like Koders SmartSearch feature etc    We would however prefer a protocolhandler for TFS Source Control  and a dedicated source code IFilter for a much more targeted solution

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This is now possible as of TFS 2015 by using the Code Search plugin  https   marketplace visualstudio com items itemName ms vss-code-search  The search is done via the web interface  and does not require you to download the code to your local machine which is nice

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Assuming you have Notepad    an often-missed feature is  Find in files   which is extremely fast and comes with filters  regular expressions  replace and all the N   goodies

[visual-studio-2008] Find in Files: Search all code in Team Foundation Server

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