Book Image

Team Foundation Server 2013 Customization

By : Gordon Beeming
Book Image

Team Foundation Server 2013 Customization

By: Gordon Beeming

Overview of this book

<p>Team Foundation Server offers you the benefit of having all your data in one system with all tools tightly integrated with each other, making it easier for teams to work together. Knowing how to customize the Team Foundation Server is very useful as well as powerful. Having the knowledge and applying it to TFS can save users many hours as well as make it easier to understand the data in TFS for reporting purposes.</p> <p>This book will show you how to customize various TFS features in order to create an enhanced experience for your users and improve their productivity. You will create custom controls that will be used in client applications and inside the web access. Next, you will learn how to embed a web page inside your work items to display rich information linked to the work items you are opening.</p> <p>This book will show you how to modify a team’s process template, and then slowly get to grips with some C# code and create a scheduled job.</p> <p>Using this book, you will create a JavaScript web access plugin that greatly increases productivity. You will start off by making various modifications to the process template to illustrate how we can cater to custom data requirements, and then we will move towards writing code to perform more complex customizations.</p> <p>Customizing Team Foundation Server 2013 is one of the best methods you can use to provide rich data for reporting in TFS.</p>
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Team Foundation Server 2013 Customization
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating a basic JavaScript plugin


Up until now in this chapter, we have been performing simple customizations that make it much easier for users to work in TFS. The next part that we are going to explore in Web Access is creating a basic JavaScript plugin that will display work item IDs on both the task and portfolio boards and the state of requirements on the task board.

Note

The JavaScript API for TFS is not an official extension point, meaning that it is not supported by Microsoft (this will not affect your TFS installation support) and does change between versions at which point your plugin could break. Normally, minor changes are required to your plugin to get it up and running. But still it is worth testing all plugins in a staging environment before applying them to a production environment where they may not work and then potentially break other functionality.

I prefer to use TypeScript as much as possible over raw JavaScript as it gives you many benefits that make it easier to prevent...