Team Foundation Server is a collaboration tool that allows you to host your source code, track requirements, tasks, testing artifacts and more, all in a single package. Integrate it with your existing IDE or editor and let your team work in a flexible environment that adapts to projects of all shapes and sizes.
From team-specific dashboards to complex server plugins, everything is covered in this concentrated guide to aid your knowledge. Delving deep, this book covers the pros and cons of check-in policies as well as their debugging and deployment strategies. After that, you will learn about Advanced XAML builds and TFS jobs. Finally, you will learn about service hooks and VSO Extensions. This will help you create new extensions and explore new levels of customization.
Explore what gives you the edge over other developers by knowing the tips and quick fixes for customizing TFS, and effectively minimize the time that users spend interacting with TFS so that they can be more productive.
Chapter 1, Creating a Dashboard and a Welcome Page, takes you through adding tiles, charts, and graphs to your dashboard and has a quick tour of the welcome pages.
Chapter 2, Streamlining Your Teams' Boards, helps you customize the board area of TFS, including the cards, swimlanes, and columns.
Chapter 3, Customizing Your Process Template, takes you through making modifications to the process template and shows you what type of changes you are able to make to the process template.
Chapter 4, Enhanced Work Item Forms with Field Custom Controls, talks about the pros and cons of custom controls and tells you how to create a new custom control that can be used for web and client work item forms.
Chapter 5, The Guide Standards for Check-in Policies, discusses the check-in policies in detail and what is required to make your own.
Chapter 6, Enforcing Standards with Server-side Plugins, introduces server-side plugins and what is required to make a TFS server plugin.
Chapter 7, Customizing the TFS Build, covers the customization of XAML builds and setting up builds with the new build system in TFS 2015.
Chapter 8, Creating TFS Scheduled Jobs, takes you through creating, installing, and monitoring TFS scheduled Jobs.
Chapter 9, Service Hooks, shows you what service hooks are and how you can use them to extend your TFS experience outside of TFS.
Chapter 10, VSO Extensions, gives a small example of how to create one such extension. Although this is currently only available in VSO, the same or at least very similar guidelines will be able to be applied when this is released to on-premise.
You will need the following software to proceed with the examples in this book:
Team Foundation Server 2015
Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition or higher
This book is for someone who is already familiar with TFS and is now at the point where they want to start making customizations to the way various components in TFS work. The book assumes that you know where various components in TFS are, so it won't be detailing step by step how to navigate through Team Foundation Server.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: " If you don't have a README.md file, a default markdown will show you what you might have there."
A block of code is set as follows:
<WebAccess version="14.0">
<plugin name="Title Strength Indicator - Web Access"
vendor="Gordon Beeming"
moreinfo="https://binary-stuff.com" version="1.0">
<modules>
<module namespace="TitleStrengthIndicator.TfsTitleStrengthIndicator"
kind="TFS.WorkItem.CustomControl"/>
</modules>
</plugin>
</WebAccess>Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
copy /Y "$(TargetDir)*.*" "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Team Foundation\Work Item Tracking\Custom Controls\14.0\"
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Then, if you want to create one, you can simply click on Edit and then alter the markdown."
Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of.
To send us general feedback, simply e-mail <[email protected]>, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.
If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide at www.packtpub.com/authors.
Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
You can download the example code files from your account at http://www.packtpub.com for all the Packt Publishing books you have purchased. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in the text or the code—we would be grateful if you could report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded to our website or added to any list of existing errata under the Errata section of that title.
To view the previously submitted errata, go to https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/support and enter the name of the book in the search field. The required information will appear under the Errata section.
Piracy of copyrighted material on the Internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the Internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy.
Please contact us at <[email protected]> with a link to the suspected pirated material.
We appreciate your help in protecting our authors and our ability to bring you valuable content.
If you have a problem with any aspect of this book, you can contact us at <[email protected]>, and we will do our best to address the problem.