Automating the creation of Team Projects

re: Automating the creation of Team Projects

wvaneck — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:20:38 GMT

Hi Brian,

Are there any plans for having the VS SDK / API include the methods needed to automate the creation of Team Projects (without Team Explorer installed)?

The reason I am asking this is because that creating "Team Projects" is regulated process within our company. This means that we must implement an audit trail and approval process before we can create a new "Team Project" and assign new people to it.

So we are looking to automate (WWF and stuff) this so we don't have to go through the stack of paper work.

re: Automating the creation of Team Projects

bharry — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:24:02 GMT

Not in the near future, no. Much of the code to do Team Project creation is actually in the Team Explorer. However, you can install Team Explorer on any machine that you like. That shouldn't prevent you from using it in an automated solution.

Brian

re: Automating the creation of Team Projects

wvaneck — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 09:29:37 GMT

That is too bad though.

I am working for a big company and we have various developer groups in different locations dealing with financial systems. Because of that only non-developers or support groups are allowed to great source code repositories and assign developers to work on the code. By automating we would prevent the deployment of Team Explorer to non-developers and on desktops which are already overloaded with other support tools. Also there is also an approval needed from the manager of a development team. If the API of TFS would also expose the creation of team projects it would greatly increase the ability to fit TFS in existing processes.

re: Automating the creation of Team Projects

bharry — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:33:22 GMT

What I see many people doing in this scenario is creating a Web App to front end this. They install Team Explorer on the Web Server and automate it there. That way end users don't have to have any of it on their machines.

Brian

re: Automating the creation of Team Projects

wvaneck — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:52:22 GMT

Making a web site is what we had in mind but with the addition of Workflow Foundation to support the approval process.

However it sounds like a workaround to me that half of what I need to do can be done through the API and the other part like creating a team project, I have to utillize a tool.

VSTS Links - 06/26/2008

Team System News — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:21:52 GMT

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