Have you ever found yourself saying something along the lines of "If only I had more time, I'd write a book about such-and-such"? Well, I've found myself saying that several times over the past year or so about Team Foundation Server. Now, don't get me wrong, there are several good books currently available for TFS but none of them quite match what I'm looking for.
I'd like a TFS Automation for Developers book that covers the details for:
- Programmatically creating new work items.
- Programmatically querying work items and modifying them.
- Creating custom check-in policies.
- Creating custom build tasks.
- Programmatically accessing and utilizing published unit test and code coverage data.
- Programmatically accessing related SharePoint documents.
- An in-depth explanation of the web services architecture and how to use it.
- An in-depth explanation of the TFS Object Model and how to use it.
- All of the above for both TFS 2005 and TFS 2008.
- Anything else I happen to think of :-)
Granted, I can find examples for most (if not all) of the above items on the web today. However, what I don't have is a comprehensive explanation of each of them and how they all relate and work together.
Searching Amazon.com for "Team Foundation Server" turned up 18 items (17 books and 1 TFS software package) of which only three appeared to focus on Team Foundation Server. The most promising book out of these three is not yet for sale (although I've added it to my wish list so I don't lose track of it). Just based on the title (Visual Studio Team Foundation Server [Microsoft .NET Development Series]) it may be close to what I'm looking for.
In the meantime, I still don't have the time (or necessarily, the skill) to write a reference book so I thought I'd start an on-line version of the tasks I outlined above. The basic purpose of the new site would be to consolidate and organize the information necessary for working with TFS programmatically. I also realize that MSDN already has a lot of information on it as well but it's not necessarily the easiest to traverse nor does it always have good examples to follow.
So, if you're interested in seeing anything specific, or if you've come across some great sites with great coding examples, please leave a comment. I'll be posting back soon on the progress.
2 comments:
I think this is a very good initiative. The customization and extensibility of TFS is great, but you need to have enough programming background in several disciplines to get the task accomplished. If you are a TFS administrator like me, but programming is not your day-2-day stuff, than it is not that easy to make some customization.
So count me in as one of your readers.
I'm actually in the position of being a day-to-day developer as well as a TFS administrator. I've extended various pieces of TFS over the past couple of years with a good amount of custom code. Although I've been able to accomplish the tasks I've needed to, I still find it's just about as difficult now as it was two years ago to get good documentation and examples. Hopefully I can help others (as well as myself) out by starting this initiative.
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