TFS API

Last year I had a great time speaking at the DevSum conference, the biggest .NET developer conference in Sweden. Back then, I talked about moving your development to the cloud using Visual Studio Team Services. Active Solution, where I work, was a gold partner for this event and in addition to me my colleagues Alan Smith and Peter Örneholm also spoke at the conference. We had a lot of fun in our booth showing the Lego robots running on Raspberry PIs, connected to Azure for movement control and result collection. ...

The new build system in Team Foundation Server 2015 and Visual Studio Team Services has from the start made it very easy to integrate with GitHub. This integration allows you to create a build in TFS/VSTS that fetches the source code from a GitHub repository. I have blogged about this integration before, at http://blog.ehn.nu/2015/06/building-github-repositories-in-tfs-build-vnext/. Publisinh a GitHubRelease from VSTS This integration allows you to use GitHub for source code, but use the powerful build system in TFS/VSTS to run your automated builds. But, when maintaining the project at GitHub you often want to publish your releases there as well, with the output from your build. ...

Update: The exension is now also available for Visual Studio 2015 Preview: https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/f5ae0a1d-005f-4a09-a19c-3f46ff30400a GitFlow is a popular workflow that provides a consistent naming convention to your branches as well as clear guidance on how your code should flow through these branches. GitFlow was introduced by Vincent Driessen in this post back in 2010, and quickly caught a lot of attention in the community. Since GitFlow by nature is very prescriptive it made a lot of sense to implement tooling support for the workflow, which Vincent added shortly after. His repo is available at https://github.com/nvie/gitflow, although it hasn’t been updated since 2012. However, several forks has been made, one of the most active is being developed by Peter van der Does at https://github.com/petervanderdoes/gitflow ...

The last couple of updates to Visual Studio has included a lot of new functionality for Visual Studio Release Management. The biggest one is the introduction of so called vNext releases, that leverages Powershell DSC for carrying out the provisioning and deployments of environments and applications. Also included in Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 was the introduction of a REST API that allows us to both trigger new releases and read back information about them. This API is only available for vNext release templates, and will probably not be implemented for the “old” agentbased deployments. ...

The last couple of years it has become apparent that using multiple team projects in TFS is generally a bad idea. There are of course exceptions to this, but there are a lot ot things that becomes much easier to do when you put all of your projects and team in the same team project. Fellow ALM MVP Martin Hinshelwood has blogged about this several times, as well as other people in the community. In particular, using the backlog and portfolio management tools makes much more sense when everything is located in the same team project. ...

Almost four years ago I wrote a post on how to create a build definition programmatically using the TFS 2010 API. The code is partyl still valid, but since a lot of the information in a build definition is dependent on the build process template, the code in the blog does not work properly for the TFS 2013 default build templates. In addition, since the introduction of Git in TFS 2013, there are some other differences in how you create a build definition for a Git team project compared to a TFVC team project. ...

We have been using TFS 2010 build for distributing a build in parallel on several agents, but where the actual compilation is done by a bunch of external tools and compilers, e.g. no MSBuild involved. We are using the ParallelTemplate.xaml template that Jim Lamb blogged about previously, which distributes each configuration to a different agent. We developed custom activities for running these external compilers and collecting the information and errors by reading standard out/error and pushing it back to the build log. ...

A year ago I blogged about how to manage your build process templates using the TFS API. The main reason for doing this is that you can (and should!) store your “golden” build process templates in a common location in your TFS project collection, and then add them to each team project that requires those templates. This way, you can fix a bug or add a new feature in one place and have the change affect all build definitions. ...

At my company we write a lot of tools and extensions that uses the TFS API to automate various things for us. A very common thing to automate is the creation of work items and the areas and iterations structure. Creating a work item using the TFS API is simple, just connect to TFS, get the WorkItemStore service object and create a new work item and set any fields that you want to: Creating a work item ...

The latest release of the Community TFS Build Extensions include a brand new tool called Community TFS Build Manager and has been created for two reasons: An implementation of the Team Foundation Build API which is referenced by the Rangers Build Customization Guidance V2 (available H1 2012) \ Provide a solution to a real problem. The Community TFS Build Manager is intended to ease the management of builds in medium to large Team Foundation Server environments, though it does provide a few features which all users may find useful. The first version of the tool has been implemented by myself and Mike Fourie. You can download the extension from the Visual Studio Gallery here: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/16bafc63-0f20-4cc3-8b67-4e25d150102c ...