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

Adding a custom activity to an existing build template


Now that we have created a custom activity, we will need to add it to the build template that we copied earlier.

Creating a build template project

The easiest way to work with build templates is to add the build template to an activity library. Perform the following points to do this:

  1. Add a new Activity Library to the same solution that contains MyCompany.ActivityLibrary and call it MyCompany.CustomBuildTemplates.

  2. Remove the Activity.xaml file.

  3. To get our template from the earlier project to this project, we will need to add an existing item to this solution, and select the CustomBuildTemplate.xaml file from the earlier project.

  4. Change the Build Action of CustomBuildTemplate.xaml to Content (make sure you add a link to the item and not just add it, as then we will need to update our build definition to point to a new template).

  5. Add a solution reference to MyCompany.ActivityLibrary.

If you look in the Toolbox, you will now see the ShareBuild...