Ivan Popek has been spending a lot of time lately digging into TFS 11.  He has written a series of posts on the APIs for teams in TFS 11, and he explains the burn down chart trend lines. TFS11 API: Query Teams and Team Members TFS11 API: Reading the Team Configuration – Iterations and Areas TFS11...

Over six years ago, I posted a sample on how to use the version control API.  The API changed in TFS 2010, but I hadn’t updated the sample.  Here is a version that works with 2010 and newer and is a little less aggressive on clean up in the finally block. This is a really simple example that...

Philip wrote a simple app to list the work items associated with the changesets for a given path, and it’s in some ways an enhanced update of Naren’s post . Given an URL to a collection and a server path (e.g., $/myproject/coolthing), it will list the work items that are associated with...

Philip, a dev on version control, recently helped with a question on how to get the TFS objects we use in our UI.  I thought I’d post since others may find it useful. We recently had a request from a customer for a VS add-in that would be able to access the same TfsTeamProjectCollection and VersionControlServer...

Nick Kirchem, who works on the TFS web access team, recently answered a question on how email subscriptions on checkin alerts.  The question was, how do I subscribe to checkin alerts not under a particular folder? Here’s how to do it. bissubscribe /eventType CheckinEvent /address someone@domain...

Custom checkin   policies and custom work item controls are great ways to take advantage of the extensibility of TFS.  You can use checkin policies to enforce certain standards on checkins (even in your builds ).  Custom work item controls allow you to add controls to your work item forms...

Allen Clark has announced the publication of the first release of the TFS 2010 SDK .  This represents a significant improvement in the documentation for the TFS API, and he will be releasing updates to it on a recurring basis.  The first release is small (relative to the size of the TFS API...

Taylor Lafrinere , a developer on Team Foundation Server who wrote a significant part of the new core server infrastructure APIs, has written a series of posts explaining some of the different parts.  If you have other parts of the API that you are interested in, be sure to leave a comment on one...

Back in 2006 I wrote a post about a performance dialog that lets you see all of the calls made by the client.  It works with Visual Studio (devenv.exe), TFS command line (tf.exe), TCM command line (tcm.exe), Test Manager (mtm.exe), etc. It’s still in the product in 2010, and it’s as useful as ever...

While I don’t have a comprehensive list, I do want to point out these four changes in particular because these classes are fundamental to the API. If you have written code with the Beta 2 client API, here are the changes you will need to be aware of to use the RC client API. TeamFoundationServerBase...

Patrick Carnahan is a developer on TFS Build, and he’s written a series of detailed posts on how to write custom activities in Windows Workflow 4.0 (WF), which is now used to orchestrate the build process for TFS Build in 2010.  It’s a deep dive on WF activities.  Jim Lamb’s post on how to...

I recently received a question from someone about the CheckInEvent. We subscribe to the Notify event using the BisSubscribe tool. Basically we have many applications that share some projects, but as TFS has no mechanism for sharing we have written our own in house app. We have hooked into Notify for...

The documentation for the team build 2008 object model is now available as a CHM file. Later this year, I'm told that the MSDN web site will be updated. http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/f/8/5f872c2e-4221-410b-b86e-4c3cd831b0c4/Team Foundation Build Managed Reference.chm After you download it...

I've made a significant update to the following post: Adding a path filter to a CheckinEvent subscription using bissubscribe .  The reason is that the paths supplied by the server aren't consistently cased while XPath is case-sensitive.  The result is that your subscriptions that filter based...

Martin Woodward has a posted a great set of slides from a presentation he did on what's new in TFS 2008. After going through all of the features other than build, he spends more than half of the slides on the build features of TFS 2008 (aka Team Build). I highly recommend taking a look at the slides...

This question came up on an internal discussion, and I thought the answer would be useful to post. Question How we can find the list of projects created with the a particular VSTF template in TFS 2008 or 2010? In TFS 2005 we can find out programmatically as well with the query but in the new...

A few times over the last several months, the question has come up regarding how to determine whether a file on disk that is being edited is different that what is checked into TFS version control. Folks looking at the PendingChange object have asked about the difference between the two hash value properties...

Aaron Hallberg has a written a great post on one of the new extensibility mechanisms we've added to the Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets file that forms the backbone of the msbuild process (it's imported by every tfsbuild.proj file and contains all of the targets and properties). Aaron shows you...

Kannan Sundararajan has written a couple of posts on how to use TFS as an ASP.NET data source. If you are interested in displaying TFS data in ASP.NET-driven web pages, you'll want to check it out. First he shows you how to build the data source and gives you the code that you need to build the dll....

Matt Mitrik , the program manager for the TFS migration tools, has announced the availability of the first pre-release version of the Team Foundation Server migration and synchronization toolkit. If you are looking into how to migrate away from a different bug tracking or version control system, this...

Last fall, Clark Sell wrote a blog post called Stop, the build is broken!! that introduced a checkin policy that reported errors when the build was broken. If you are using continuous integration where every checkin starts a build, you want folks to stop and fix build breaks when they occur, rather than...

I recently needed to test a new checkin policy that I wrote. In order to do that, I needed to enable a checkin policy for the unit test's team project using the version control API. I was a little surprised when it wasn't quite as obvious as I had hoped, and I had to poke around in the source to figure...

The Visual Studio 4.0 SDK was released today. Here's the announcement. On behalf of the VS Tools Ecosystem team, we are pleased to announce that after months of hard work, we have completed shipping the VS SDK 4.0 RTM release! We have done tons of work to make this release friendly to developers who...

Here's the announcement. Please download the TFS Virtual PC image and let us know what you think. Except for build scheduling, this CTP contains all of the new Team Build features, including continuous integration. We are excited to announce that the Visual Studio Code Name “Orcas” March 2007 CTP is...

Jeff has posted a nice GUI for creating event subscriptions. This tool makes the process less arcane and error prone. Check it out! Team Foundation Server Event Subscription Tool To set up advanced subscriptions, you needed to use bissubscribe.exe. This is problematic, because the command-line syntax...