Community TFS Team Tools released at CodePlex

I’ve  just pushed the button and released the Community TFS Team Tools Codeplex project, and the binaries is now packaged and downloadable from Visual Studio Gallery as Community Tfs Team Command line utility. All in effort to make the tools and source code easily available.

Links and locations
You will find the Community Tfs Team Tools codeplex project at http://tfsteamTools.codeplex.com and the latest stable binaries at http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/36986691-931d-4e2e-bbc2-1b2f03a4eff5

Based on the ALM Rangers Quick Response Code sample
The Community TFS Team Tools project is based on the ALM Rangers Quick Response Code Sample, and extended with more features. If you want to know more about the ALM Rangers or the Quick Response Sample that started it all, please read the following posts 
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/willy-peter_schaub/archive/2012/06/22/introducing-the-visual-studio-alm-rangers.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2012/06/11/quick-response-sample-command-line-utility-to-manage-team-foundation-server-teams-and-users.aspx

Future plans
Jason Stangroome did a PowerShell Quick Response sample based on the rangers Quick Response Sample ;) ,  you can find it at https://github.com/codeassassin/PsTfsTeams. This got me thinking about exposing the commands as PowerShell Commandlets, preferable without duplicating the code. So if I find a way, or hopefully get pointed at it,  it might be the next feature.

TfsTeam command line utility

Last week I did a quick job to unblock a rangers project and create a command line tool for managing team and team members.  Although the tool released quickly unblocked the rangers project, the feature set was far from complete, so why leave it half done?

Short recap
In the beginning of June my fellow rangers discovered a missing feature, there was no tooling to enable automation of managing the new features of teams and team members in TFS 2012 RC. A day later we had a working solution with the basic feature set (List teams, create team, add user to team) that after reviews got published as a code sample. For those more interested you can read more about it the following posts http://blogs.msdn.com/b/willy-peter_schaub/archive/2012/06/13/highlighting-the-decline-of-alm-rangers-cadence.aspx  and  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2012/06/11/quick-response-sample-command-line-utility-to-manage-team-foundation-server-teams-and-users.aspx

Completing the feature set
After a short brainstorming exercise I came up with the following basic features ListTeams, GetDefaultTeam, SetDefaultTeam, CreateTeam, DeleteTeam,RenameTeam, ListTeamMembers, addUser, RemoveUser as a suitable feature set for a first release. As I got most things setup and figured out already it didn’t take long to implement the complete feature set.

The resulting exe and source code can now be downloaded from my skydrive until I can get an official place to put it to.

 

Next step
The next step is most likely to release it on codeplex and Visual Studio Gallery as a community tool. And then start building a backlog, witch at the moment contains a couple of minor fixes and perhaps looking to add PowerShell Commandlets to it.

Generate accumulated Release Notes in TFS build, part II

By using the  BuildReport and CompareLabel activities we can create a build report, but can it be transformed into a release notes document ?
This post continues the previous post Generate accumulated Release Notes in TFS build http://mskold.blogspot.se/2012/05/generate-accumulated-release-notes-in.html

The out of the box report
By default the build report activity generates a report that is "changesets" centric, It lists all changesets the files and associated work items of each changesets. This might be good for a build report, but if you want a release note report, you probably would want it "work item centric", listing associated work item first and maybe list changesets without work item as Undocumented changes.

Changing the output
Luckily for us, we have the option to change the output. The BuildReport activity creates a xml file with the report data and then creates a html report by applying a xslt transformation. By supplying our own xslt file we can customize the output to suite us better, with some libations as we're bound to the data in the xml file.

The customized report

Even though the xml data isn't structured in the way we would prefer for our needs, actually the row xml data is also kind of changesets centric. But by using xslt it's still possible to extract a list of work items. By applying this xslt file https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=5D46CAE8C0008CF0&id=5D46CAE8C0008CF0!1058, the resulting report looks something like this.