.Net and VisualStudio ALM
Archive for July, 2012
TFS 2010: A standalone installer for the TFS 2010 SP1 client Object Model API
Jul 16th
A small post to inform you that Microsoft released a standalone installer for the Team Foundation Server 2010 SP1 client Object Model API! You can found it on the Visual Studio Gallery here:
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a37e19fb-3052-4fc9-bef7-4a4682069a75
Before this installer, if you wanted to develop an application that interacts with TFS you needed to install Team Explorer to have those few needed DLLs… this isn’t the cas anymore 
Of course licencing doesn’t change and your user will still need a TFS CAL.
A TFS 2012 version will be available with the RTM.
Carpe Diem.
TFS 2012: Add a custom section in a build summary
Jul 9th
With the previous versions of TFS you could customized the buil summary from TeamBuild by developing Visual Studio add-in and deploy is on every computer. This was not simple and it was simplified in Visual Studio 2012 / Team Foundation Server 2012
Everything is done with the new standard TeamBuild activity WriteCustomSummaryInformation:
- Open your build workflow.
- Add the WriteCustomSummaryInformation activity where you want.
- Sets the activity parameters.
The available parameters are the following :
- SectionKey : the section unique key,
- SectionDisplayName : the section name to display on the summary,
- SectionPriority : the section priority which defines it’s placement relative to other sections,
- Message : the message to display.
And here is the custom section you get:
If you want to display multiple lines from different locations in your workflow, you can add as many activity as need just remember to specify the same SectionKey. For the SectionDisplayName and SectionPriority parameters it’s the first encountered value that is used.
Messages must be text only but can contains links. To add links in your messages, use the following syntax : (link). If the link starts with “vsts:”, it will be considered as a link pointing to a TFS artefact and will be handle by Visual Studio; for other link types, the operating system is called
The priority must be an integer greater or equals to 0, 0 is the highest priority which will place the section at the top of the summary. The first standard section starts at 100. You can hover with the mouse on a section name to display its key and priority (as shown in the previous screenshot ). By using these, you can add your own messages to the standard sections. you can even reorder them and change their name by specifying new values to the SectionDisplayName and SectionPriority parameters
As explained, messages can only be text based, this is a limitation of the new activity and model. If you need to add a custom section with more rich content (text, images, graphics…) you will have to use the same method as in the previous version and develop a Visual Studio add-in.
Even if it doesn’t cover every need, this standard activity is a good start
Carpe Diem.
