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

Chapter 5. Creating TFS Scheduled Jobs

In this chapter, we will cover the creation of jobs in TFS and demonstrate the updating of work items on a schedule. The topics covered in this chapter are:

  • Creating a job that will be able to perform the same job as the work item changed plugin, as discussed in the previous chapter, which includes:

    • Writing the code

    • Deploying the code

    • Registering the custom job and adding it to a schedule

    • Verifying that the job is installed

  • Checking the job history

  • Debugging a TFS job

  • Deregistering the custom job with TFS

In TFS, jobs are the best place to place logic that you would want to run on a schedule, unlike the server plugins that run on every work item change and only once per change. It is important to know though that the TFS Background Job Agent is not designed for time-critical jobs such as seconds, minutes, and so on.