As part of its Shared Source program, Microsoft has released "Power Toys for Visual Studio" tools, which are intended to address developer pain points and diagnostics, according to a Microsoft blog this week.

"We released several new Shared Source tools that include source code to real-world tools and encourage customers to extend the tools as needed, essentially creating mini-communities for help and support for related tasks," said S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president for the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/).

Three tools are available, including MSBee (http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=MSBee), which allows developers to build managed applications with MSBuild using Visual Studio 2005 projects targeting the 1.1. release of the .Net Framework.

Other tools include Team Foundation Server Admin (http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=TFSAdmin) tool, allowing administrators to add and modify user permissions on the company's Team Foundation Server offering, and Managed Stack Explorer, (http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=MSE) for monitoring .Net 2.0 managed processes and stacks.

"Already in the first week, there have been nearly 1,000 downloads of MSBee and almost 700 downloads" each of the other two offerings, Somasegar said.''''