It’s almost time for TechFest again … it’s amazing how quickly the time flies! It’s seems like only yesterday that I told Michael what my sessions would be, thinking, of course, that I’d have plenty of time to do them. No, it wasn’t yesterday either – it was a few months ago. But … I’m just now starting to do the presentations. While there is a blurb about the sessions on the TechFest site, I also wanted to post them here – with some more information.
Customizing TFS Process Template – Level 300
Or maybe it’s level 400. This is not going to be your every day talk about customizing process templates; there is plenty of that out there. While I may mention (and even, very briefly, show) the TFS Process Template Editor Power Tool, that’s not what I’m going to focus on. I’ll be digging into the core of what makes these templates work and how they are configured behind the scenes. This means that we’ll be playing in the XML behind the templates. We will look – deeply – at how the templates are constructed and where all of the pieces are. I’ll also share some code utilities that I’ve developed to help create process templates from an existing Team Project; specifically, I’ll show code to export work items and work item queries. I’ll also mention how to do custom plugins for the Project Creation Wizard, allowing you to really “kick it up a notch!”
Team Foundation Build 2010
With Team Foundation Server 2010 Build Server, the build services got a complete redesign, moving away from an MSBuild-based build process to a more flexible and extensible build process based on Windows Workflow Foundation 4.0. I will talk about TFS build, the architecture and how to configure build controllers and agents. From there, I’ll be digging into the Build Process Templates, how to customize and extend them with out-of-the-box activities as well as custom activities, as well as some tips and tricks about how to manage extensions and your build environment. Finally, I’ll talk about the upgrade path from TFS 2005/2008 builds (yes, there is one) and some of the gotchas that you may experience on the way. I’ve not yet decided which activity to use as an example, but I’m leaning towards using the one that I wrote to change the build workspace as a part of the process. Or the zip activity. Or both? We’ll see.
Keep in mind … this is the kind of stuff that I do all day, every day, day in and day out. Those of you who know me also know that I’m not one to settle for touching on the surface but get deep into the technical aspects … these sessions will be no different. They will not be your typical TFS sessions. There will be code - and a goodly chunk of it - that works with the mysterious and very poorly documented TFS APIs.