Anyone with TFS Extension Experience? How hard is it?

Hi,
    We're thinking about a gradual migration of our in-house task tracking\timesheet\billing system into TFS.  The first step would be to get out in-house code and TFS to synchronise changes.

How hard is it to get TFS to run custom code when a task is updated by the user?

I did look at TFS extension a year or so ago, but I'm rusty!


Herbie

EDIT:  I couldn't decide if this was Coffeehouse or Tech-Off material, so I opted for CoffeeHouse.  Hope no-one objects.

"Hope no-one objects."

KILL HIM! but spare the small humanoid attempting to strangle him..

..anyway, I'm interesting in TFS too - currently using visual svn and subversion and I'm probably using it wrong but it frequently decides to find things to argue with me about..

stevo_ said:

"Hope no-one objects."

KILL HIM! but spare the small humanoid attempting to strangle him..

..anyway, I'm interesting in TFS too - currently using visual svn and subversion and I'm probably using it wrong but it frequently decides to find things to argue with me about..

Oh right, blame SVN, it's ALWAYS SVN's fault.

But when want you the last time YOU asked svn how SHE was feeling?
Whenne was the last thing you told svn she looked nice?

when was the last time YOU suggested going out to dinner?

Hmm?

Pfft. Men.

Anyway, TFS seems pretty well behaved, but I don't use it that often (just at a site I do the occasional bit of work for) I don't know if they are using extensions though.

I have noticed, however that the time and bug tracking parts of the system can be infuriating to use, so for that side of things they ended up dropping TFS and using Gemini.

*Dons fireproof suit*

Anyway I've heard that Visual SourceSafe is pretty good, and is what we should all be using.

*runs away*

stevo_ said:

"Hope no-one objects."

KILL HIM! but spare the small humanoid attempting to strangle him..

..anyway, I'm interesting in TFS too - currently using visual svn and subversion and I'm probably using it wrong but it frequently decides to find things to argue with me about..

When you say it argues, do you mean in teh sense that stuff stops working, or about the way it handles conflict resolution?

briankel said:

We have built a TFS Migration & Synchronization toolkit designed to help with this exact scenario. Basically it abstracts some of the API's for getting data into and out of Team Foundation Server, and works with a provider model such that you write a provider for your 3rd party or custom work tracking and/or source control system and plug it into the Migration & Synchronization engine. From there you can sync on a schedule (e.g. every day), sync based on events (e.g. every time a check-in happens in one system), or of course manually.

In terms of how hard it is? I'd say it's a 3 (though I refuse to define the scale I'm using )

...but seriously... it primarily depends on the API support of your existing 3rd party / in-house solution and how hard it's going to be to write the provider to get data into and out of that system.

Hope that helps, and welcome to Team Foundation Server! If you get stuck there is a discussion forum at the Codeplex site I linked to above. Folks from the product group hang out in that forum.

Brian Keller
Sr. Technical Evangelist
Visual Studio Team System

Thanks,  I'll look into the toolkit!

Our application isn't particularly clever (monolithic remoting server and client) so it'll be more of a DB-level update for our system whenever a work item changes in TFS.  It's the usual story:  minimal buget to get our internal systems sorted out because we're too busy with billable work!

Been using TFS for source control for over a year and I'm happy with it; it just seems a waste not to utilise the rest of the system!

Herbie

jh71283 said:

stevo_ said:

*snip*

When you say it argues, do you mean in teh sense that stuff stops working, or about the way it handles conflict resolution?

Meh, not worth explaining my problems - I'm sure its wrongly configured or I'm using it wrong since its such a mature system.. and I cannot imagine this being the usual experience.

It just reminds me to much of a tool that you have to learn its quirks and process.. vs the tool doing what you would expect.. counter-intuitive?

briankel said:

We have built a TFS Migration & Synchronization toolkit designed to help with this exact scenario. Basically it abstracts some of the API's for getting data into and out of Team Foundation Server, and works with a provider model such that you write a provider for your 3rd party or custom work tracking and/or source control system and plug it into the Migration & Synchronization engine. From there you can sync on a schedule (e.g. every day), sync based on events (e.g. every time a check-in happens in one system), or of course manually.

In terms of how hard it is? I'd say it's a 3 (though I refuse to define the scale I'm using )

...but seriously... it primarily depends on the API support of your existing 3rd party / in-house solution and how hard it's going to be to write the provider to get data into and out of that system.

Hope that helps, and welcome to Team Foundation Server! If you get stuck there is a discussion forum at the Codeplex site I linked to above. Folks from the product group hang out in that forum.

Brian Keller
Sr. Technical Evangelist
Visual Studio Team System

I think one of the things I don't like with TFS is that, it's tightly built around domain accounts. So when we work as contractor on site, and all we 8-10 programmers are given a single domain account only, using TFS is almost impossible. (We end up naming one of us responsible for check-in stuffs from SourceSafe, others using SourceSafe only. Therefore making our use of TFS almost pointless)

Can't TFS be made to support mixed mode like SQL server? So if the project owner don't need it, they can use domain logon only. But if they need seperate account, there's always a choice.

IMO, forcing users to use domain account is a poor usability decision especially when you work on government site, where application for creation of domain account is extremely troublesome.