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 custom build activity


Out of the box, there are many build activities that you can use to customize your build process. If you find this is not enough, you can download and install TFS Build Extensions from Codeplex (http://tfsbuildextensions.codeplex.com/). There will still be scenarios where you need to create your own custom activities. Now, we will be creating a custom activity that will, at the end of our build, zip up our output, publish the ZIP file to the FTP site, and then tweet a link to this file. This sample could be useful for projects where you want to inform your followers of new nightly builds that are available. You can read more about build activities on MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg265783.aspx.

Creating the custom activity project

Create a new C# Activity Library project called MyCompany.ActivityLibrary. This can be found under the Workflow tab in the new project dialog, as shown in the following screenshot:

Creating a new activity library...