Find in Files: Search all code in Team Foundation Server

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

There is another alternative solution, that seems to be more attractive.

1. Setup a search server - could be any windows machine/server
2. 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
3. Setup an indexing service/windows indexed search on the Search server for the root folder
4. Expose a web service to return search results

Now with all the above setup, you have a few options for the client:

1. 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)
2. 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:

1. Use this tool instead of bissubscribe.exe
2. Handling TFS events
3. Team System Notifications

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

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.

Okay,

1. 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."

2. There is a Windows program with this functionality posted on CodePlex. I just installed and tested this and it works well.

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.

This add-in claims to have the functionality that I believe you seek:

Team Foundation Sidekicks