Category: TFS API
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VSTS Rest API – Hard to find methods
This post does not have a lot of text, only an introduction. I use the VSTS Rest API quite a lot and the documentation is great, but not everything is documented or hard to find. In this post, I list some snippets that you can use to get even more…
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REST call to get all tasks in your VSTS account
This time, a small and simple post. I was working on a solution to get all tasks used in multiple build definitions. When you get the Build Definition with the REST API, you see a reference to the tasks by it’s GUID. But the displayname, group etc, is not displayed…
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Programmatically promote your package quality with Release Views in VSTS
A short while ago, Package Management in VSTS became publicly available. Agreed, the features in the initial version are not overwhelming, but the potential is very high. If you are not familiar yet, with Package Management in VSTS , I highly recommend you take a look at the documentation on…
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Set output variable in a Powershell VSTS Build Task
Currently I am building a pipeline that performs some actions on Azure. For example creating a Azure Storage Account. When doing this, I want to return some values from my Powershell script back into a variable of my Build Pipeline, so I can use this in another task. After some searching…
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Call VS Team Services (VSTS) REST API from your Build Pipeline
Today I had the necessity to call the Visual Team Services (VSTS) REST API to get the code changes associated to the build I was currently running. I want these changes to get all the files and to do some actions with the files that were changed. First I tried to…
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Integrate your on-premise ticket system with Visual Studio Team Services (fka VS Online)
There is a lot going on in the TFS/VSTS world. I hear more and more customers talking about the move to VSTS and I think this is a very good trend. Many scenarios that were showstoppers before are in place on VSTS and some scenarios are coming on short –term.…
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Bulk destroy Work Items from Team Foundation Server
WARNING: Destroy work items is a irreversible action so use with caution and at your own risk! Lately I am quire busy with all kinds of migration work to Team Foundation Server. This means a lot of testing, modifying and re-testing. Because the target Team Project has quite some modifications…
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Insert an inline image into a Work Item with the TFS API
On the verge of 2014 I wanted to share a last post with you. At the moment I am working on a migration tool to migrate from another system to TFS 2013. The source system contains a lot of items with a description that contains images. Not as an attachment but…
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Add permissions with TFSSecurity–The ultimate reference
UPDATE 7/15/2015: Hayder Casey from Microsoft provided me with the details on using the Tagging namespace. You can use this one to set the [Create Tag Definition] security setting. UPDATE 4/25/2016: Microsoft has now updated MSDN to have decent documentation on MSDN found here Sooner or later, every TFS Administrator…
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Using Local workspaces – Promote Excluded changes with TFS 2012 API
Since the introduction of Local workspaces in TFS 2012 I use them where I can. I really like the concept of local workspaces as it gives me much more flexibility when working with my files. (read more about Server and Local Workspaces in my previous post(s)) Local workspaces are also…
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Keep track of your Team Projects Process Template Version
The company I work for (Delta-N), is a service company. We built software for various customers and we do so by means of projects. It should not surprise you that we maintain all our development projects in Team Foundation Server and, since we use TFS since the first version (TFS…
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Top 10 of things every TFS Administrator should do
I spent a fair amount of time on different social media channels like Twitter (@renevo)and LinkedIn and I noticed an interesting thing. Every time someone posts a Top 10 of things or tips it receives a lot of positive comments. It is a fact. People like lists and I tend…
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Deleting (or destroying) a Global List with the TFS API
One of the most used features in TFS Work Items are Global Lists. We use global lists very frequently because it save a lot of time in maintaining list data amongst different Team Projects. What we also do very often is adding and removing items to and from a global…
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Custom Build Activities Type is greyed out in Build Definition editor
Lately I am quite busy with building Custom Build activities for TFS 2012. I also did this in TFS 2010 but it seems that I avoided some issues there. In my previous blog posts I described some migration issues with TFS build. This is about an issue I had with…
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Audit Trail on TFS Source Control.
Today I got the question if I could see when a person did a Get Latest Version on TFS Source Control. Check-ins are easily found in the Source Control History but Get Latest Versions are not in the history. After some searching I found the tbl_Command in the TFS Collection…
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‘Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Client.IProjectFile’ is obsolete
For my customer I was implementing some advanced BuildNumbering mechanism (Here can you find a good post about this). Because it was important that the stuff worked, I wrote some Unit Tests. I usually do that and need IBuildDetail. Jim Lamb has a great post about how to stub The…
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Lessons learned in upgrading my TFS 2010 Build templates to TFS 2012
Awaiting the Visual Studio 2012 Launch I am preparing our builds to work on TFS 2012. In my previous post I described that I updated the references and imported some namespaces and then everything worked! Because there were some issues with our current builds, I decided to restructure our build…
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Upgrading your Custom Build Template to TFS 2012
In the past years I have been quite busy with customizing the build for both my own and also custom organizations. Today I was experimenting with the build definitions on my TFS 2012 Release Candidate installation. I attached a TFS 2010 Team Project Collection to my TFS 2012 Server as…
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Error when copying Build Template “The type ‘TfsBuild.Process’ already contains a definition for…”
I do quite a lot of Build customizations and usually I create a new Build Template for each type of Build I want to do. You can choose to copy the file in the Build Definition Editor or you can just Copy/Paste the file in Windows Explorer. The advantage of…
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Create TFS Event Subscription programmatically with TFS API
Event Subscriptions in TFS are a very powerful mechanism to get notification about event happening in TFS. You can use the Alerts Explorer, that comes with the TFS Powertools (like I describe in this post), but sometimes it is easier to create subscriptions automatically. In this post I will show…
The Road to ALM 