TFS API

Today the first stable release of the Community TFS 2010 Build Extensions shipped on the CodePlex site. Visual Studio ALM MVP Mike Fourie (aka Mr MSBuild Extension Pack) has been the leader of this project and has done a tremendous job, both in contributing functionality as well as coordinating the work for the first release. Great work Mike! I (as well as several others) have contributed a small part of the activities, I plan to be working on the upcoming releases as well. ...

** Source available at http://mergeworkitems.codeplex.com/ ** Half a year ago I wrote about about Merging Work Items with a custom check-in policy. The policy evaluated the pending changes and for all pending merges, it traversed the merge history to find the associated work items and let the user add them to the current changeset. I promised to post the source to the check-in policy (and I’ve got a lot of requests for it), but I never did. This was primary for two reasons: ...

Some time ago, I wrote a post about how to implement dependency replication using TFS 2008 Build. We use this for Library builds, where we set up a build definition for a common library, and have the build check the resulting assemblies back into source control. The folder is then branched to the applications that need to reference the common library. See the above post for more details. Of course, we have reimplemented this feature in TFS 2010 Build, which results in a much nicer experience for the developer who wants to setup a new library build. Here is how it looks: There is a separate build process template for library builds registered in all team projects \ ...

One of the great new features in TFS 2010 Build was the ability to define Build Process Templates that can be reused across build definitions. The Build Process Template file itself is a Windows Workflow 4.0 xaml file and can be stored anywhere in source control. When a developer creates a new build definition in Team Explorer, he can choose from a list of Build Process Templates: This list is populated with the following build process templates: ...

Update 2012-01-23: Added note about .NET framework Martin Hinshelwood wrote an excellent post recently http://nakedalm.com/team-foundation-server-2010-event-handling-with-subscribers/ ) about a new type of integration available in TFS 2010, namely server side event handlers, that is executed within the TFS context. I wasn’t aware of this new feature and as Martin notes, there doesn’t seem to be any material/documentation of it at all. Previously, when you wanted some custom action to be executed when some event occurs in TFS (check-in, build completed…) you wrote a web/WCF service with a predefined signature and subscribed to the event using bissubscribe.exe. Usually you want to get more information from TFS than what is available in the event itself so you would have to use the TFS client object model to make new requests back to TFS to get that information. The deployment of these web services is always a bit of a hassle, especially around security. Also there is no way to affect the event itself, e.g. to stop the event from finishing depending on some condition. This can be done using server side events. ...

*** UPDATE 2010-08-17 ** Several people have asked me for a complete sample application, so I have put this together and it is available here: http://cid-ee034c9f620cd58d.office.live.com/self.aspx/BlogSamples/CreateTFSBuildDefinition.zip In this post I will show how to create a new build definition in TFS 2010 using the TFS API. When creating a build definition manually, using Team Explorer, the necessary steps are lined out in the New Build Definition Wizard: So, lets see how the code looks like, using the same order. To start off, we need to connect to TFS and get a reference to the IBuildServer object: ...

In TFS Team Build (all versions), each build is associated with changesets and work items. To determine which changesets that should be associated with the current build, Team Build finds the label of the “Last Good Build” an then aggregates all changesets up unitl the label for the current build. Basically this means that if your build is failing, every changeset that is checked in will be accumulated in this list until the build is successful. ...

In previous versions of TFS, you installed TFS Team Build on the build server and you got one build service agent. It was/is possible to start several build agents on the same server, but it is a bit of a mess. In addition, for each team project TFS 2008 build service can only execute one at a time (Note that builds from different team project can execute in parallell, a lot of people still don’t know this) ...