How to customise I have knowledge to customise process template in tfs 2015 or in 2012 but for upgrade version in 2017 is there any changes or any enhancement.
I have find in google but I have not found any helpful to customise process template in 2017 specifically.
your help should be appreciated. thanks
The first step is you need to download the process template you want to edit from you TFS server. To do this, launch Visual Studio and navigate in the menus to "Team -> Team Project Collection Settings -> Process Template Manager". When the dialog shows up, you will be able to select the template you wish to edit and download it. Detailed instructions for this can also be found here.
Once you have downloaded the process template, you have a series of XML files that describe how TFS should handle almost everything when you create a new project using that template. The XML can get overwhelming quickly, even for the most seasoned person. You should ideally use the Process Template Editor which is a plugin for Visual Studio (the link is for Visual Studio 2017). For details on customizing a template, you should start off by reading the Customize a process template on the Visual Studio documentation site.
Once you've made your changes, you simply need to upload your process template back to the server using the Process Template Manager (where you downloaded the template). If you replace an existing template, anything using that template will get the updates. If you create a new template, only new projects using that template will be able to make use of it.
Not much has changed with editing the process templates between TFS 2013, TFS 2015 and TFS 2017. So if you find a blog or a write up on one of the versions, there is a good chance it's still valid. There may be slight differences in UI, but there shouldn't be anything ground breaking.
DISCLAIMER!!!
Now that I've answered your question, I would be negligent if I didn't explain the dangers of what you are about to do. Customizing a TFS process template can be very dangerous to your TFS server. Microsoft does not guarantee or put any warranty on changes you make. You customize a template, you are on your own. You have to understand that this template literally tells TFS how to work. It is highly recommended to have a sandbox environment complete separated from your production server and make all changes in said sandbox environment first. Only after you've validated the changes should you move it to your production environment. In addition, anytime you deploy a change to your production server, make sure you have healthy backups your databases. I can't stress this enough.
Lastly, any changes you make, you run the risk of locking yourself into a specific version of TFS or making your upgrade path far more difficult. My last piece of advice is to carefully weigh the need for customization over the risk associated with making it.
Related
How do I view and integrate with GitHub issues using Visual Studio 2022?
When connected to an Azure Repo, the VS Team Explorer window includes a "Work Items" view that shows open issues from Azure Boards. I can easily create a branch from one, link it automatically, and submit pull requests. The integration is great.
When I connect to a GitHub repository, that integration is lost. The Team Explorer window no longer contains a "Work Items" view. Since I can't view the issues, I can no longer automatically create branches that are linked to the issue. I have to now manually type in the issue number if I want to link a commit to the issue. And the "Create Pull Request" menu items simply launches the browser to the GitHub page; there's no integration there, either.
I have found a VS Code blog post that enables a lot of this functionality (and more) into VS Code, but I've yet to find anything for Visual Studio 2022. From that post, I am most interested in the "Working on issues" bit. As described above, this was functionality that worked with Azure Repos but is lost with GitHub integration. How might I regain that functionality with GitHub and Visual Studio 2022?
The "old" team explorer did a number of really nice things, but it was also very hard to integrate into for other tool vendors. With the new Git experience the Visual Studio team opted for a more agnostic approach.
The old Team Explorer was written in .NET 4 and was very much geared towards integrating with Azure DevOps. It stems from 2005 when Team Foundation Server first got released. Over time other vendors snuck their way into Team Explorer, but mostly through undocumented and unsupported ways. This has caused many interesting issues in the past. The concept of the Team Explorer window also wasn't ideal for hosting GitHub, Azure DevOps, BitBucket and every other tool-vendor that wanted to be listed and there was very little in the way of control for users to set the order of elements or hide certain tiles. As such it's a breeding ground for bugs and it needed to be ported to .NET Core and x64 and to support out-of-process extensibility to properly support Visual Studio 2022 anyway.
So Team Explorer and its old undocumented extensibility points were dropped and the new Git Window was born. This window is a pure git client and it's vendor agnostic. Vendors may add menu items to the top level menu, but they currently can't extend the new git window.
At the same time, Visual Studio 2022 dropped support for the built-in browser window, which was a memory hog, loads IE11 and also needed full retooling to support the x64 out-of-process loading that Visual Studio 2022 now demands.
All of this work now allows Visual Studio to use more memory, it's faster and by moving extensions out-of-process, it has greatly improved the performance and stability of the visual studio platform. Unfortunately this all happened at the expense of some features.
The new git experience is no longer constrained by the Team Explorer window, is a top-level citizen in Visual Studio and can finally use easier to remember keyboard shortcut keys. It's much faster too and the new architecture allowed the team to build interactive rebase, multi-repo support, submodule support and more. But their priorities have been in advanced git scenarios for a long while, not in building support for vendor specific issue integration. It looks like that may be changing though. Auto-completion of #... is now in Visual Studio 17.5 preview:
Some tool vendors may invest in native integration into Visual Studio in the future. Many old extensions are no longer available in VS2022 or the authors are still working on a new version that conforms to the new requirements.
On the other hand you have VS Code, which is used by GitHub itself internally, runs in a browser, powers github.dev and github codespaces and doesn't carry the legacy if Visual Studio 2022. It's not Microsoft, but GitHub who has extended vscode and they added the support for their platform through extensions and open source contribution to the editor directly. GitHub has a different stake in vscode, they have the engineering staff that knows how to extend atom-based applications (they basically built that technology) thus, their features have been added to vscode.
Is it fair? Do we want it in big VS as well? Sure, but unfortunately, that's currently not where the money is being spent.
There are a few ways to accomplish what you want. But none are exactly what you desire.
The web
The main way is to start working from the browser. On every issue there is a Development section from which you can create a branch or initiate a pull request from the associated branch:
You can then immediately check it out locally
Or navigate to the code panel for the branch and click the open in visual studio link. This will launch visual studio in the correct context using the repo you selected and will check out the branch locally for you to start working.
Any commits you make to this branch are automatically associated to the issue, so there's no need to pass in the #issuenumber every time.
The cli
An alternative to working from the browser is to use the CLI. If you have the GitHub CLI installed it will pick up the context of your repo from the list of remotes and you can perform quick commands straight from visual studio's built-in terminal.
gh pr create
to create a new PR.
gh issue list
to quickly list your open issues
gh issue develop #issuenumber
to create a branch on the remote, associate it to your issue and check out the branch locally.
It takes a bit of getting used to the commands, but if you like the CLI it's a quick way to work.
In Visual Studio
You can create pull requests from your current state, which will then bring you to the browser with most of the data pre-filled. Issue auto-completion also works in the browser from that point forward.
To get the other features you want, you must install extensions. Unfortunately, GitHub has stopped development on the old GitHub for Visual Studio extension since most of its features have now moved into visual studio. It's not easy to build and maintain an extension for multiple versions of Visual Studio, so I don't expect this will be brought back to life.
I rely on the Git Web links extension to quickly switch between web and visual studio from the context of my working files:
In the settings you can set the default behavior to not copy, but to open in browser.
Other functionality you're after is currently not available through a publicly listed extension. Most of there features have also been removed or deprecated for Azure DevOps itself, so I don't expect the Visual Studio team to be in a hurry to add first-class support for Issue tracking back in.
Unfortunately, the "Work Items" view and the related issue integration for GitHub Repos is not currently available in Visual Studio 2022 out of the box.
You might be able to find a Visual Studio extension that provides this functionality, but I'm not aware of any off the top of my head.
An alternative option would be to use the GitHub API to retrieve the issues, and create a custom extension to display the issues in Visual Studio 2022. However, this would require custom development work on your part.
It seems like the VS2022 will have this feature in future (it's in Preview now).
https://youtu.be/0NiHvdoMBO8?t=95 [VS2022 Preview Feature]
We use Team Foundation Server (now Azure DevOps) in conjunction with Visual Studio as our version control system.
I am our teams ssrs report developer and, unfortunately, sometimes throughout the course of my day I'll be working on multiple projects and will have a report checked out, however I'm unsure what changes I might have pending (it could be something actually valuable for production, or just something I was testing). Is there a built in way to compare pending changes to the code vs the current saved version?
Per Daniel Mann's excellent comment, the answer is very simple. Right click > Compare!
I'm trying to upload a new custom template to TFS 2018 Versión 16.122.27102.1.
In the documentation showed here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/work/work-items/guidance/manage-process-templates?view=vsts
In Visual Studio in the tab called: team -> project collection settings -> process template manager
It opens a new window with the options to upload, download, make default, delete.
But when I click on it, the process template manager in Visual Studio it redirects me to the web portal of TFS, the process section.
I want to interact with the window showed in the documentation, since I can't upload a new custom process using the web portal, it throws a generic error when I try to upload.
I got help by the Developer Community at Visual Studio, the answer was really simple, I needed to change the name of the template but also the VERSION of it.
I was changing a ton of stuff about the template, name, WIT's, etc. But if you don't change the VERSION of the template pretty much manually you can't upload it.
Thank you very much to all the people that helped me.
I am by no means a visual studio expert. However I have done some searching on this topic and cannot find anything to help me.
I'm working on a VS 2010 web application. We are using TFS 2012 for source control. I wouldn't be suprised if this is causing my issue so I make a special mention of it.
The issue I'm having is every morning after I open the project I have to go into Tools / Extension Manager and search online and add JScript Editor Extensions. When I open the project the next day it's gone and I have to add it again. (I think sometimes it does this right in the middle of coding - my Javascript window changes size and loses formatting)
An extension that stays every day regardless is NuGet package manager, so it's not removing every extension.
I suspect that when I get latest from TFS it's overwriting the solution or project which contains the reference to the extension but I haven't been able to verify this.
Can anyone tell me why extensions would be removed? Are these a local user setting or are they contained in the project file?
Taking a step back, my real problem is complete lack of integration between C# and Javascript in the web programming world. I need all the help I can get on the Javascript side.
There were a number of issues with buggy extension addins. To clarify are you using visual studio 2010 with tfs 2012 plugin?
The recommended process for identifying the buggy extension is to disable the extensions one at a time until the buggy one is isolated.
the source control shell for tfs2012 can be installed as a separate shell if needed.
I suspect the script editor extensions however.
I am developing an Isolated Shell that caters to "designers/special content creators" performing specific tasks, using the Shell. As they operate on files, they need to be able to use TFS for source control. This is mainly due to the fact that Developers will also operate on the same files from TFS but using Visual studio 2008.
After looking and searching I still could not find Team Explorer to be available to Shell.
Asking on MSDN forums, lead me to the answer that "this is not supported yet in the Isolated Shell". Well, then the whole point of giving away a shell is not justified, if you want to use a source control system for your files. The idea is not to recreate everything and develop tool windows etc using the TFS provider API.
The Visual Studio Extensibility book by Keyven Nayyeri has an example, which only goes so far into this problem of adding a sc provider.
Has anyone worked on developing Visual Studio 2008 Isolated Shell applications/environment? Please provide comments, questions - anything that you have to share apart from the following threads, which I've already participated in.
Threads from MSDN forums:
Team Explorer for Isolated Shell
Is it possible to use Team Explorer in VS Shell Isolated?
Thanks for your answer. Yes you are right, we will acquire CALs for users without having to buy them Visual Studio, that's the direction we will be taking.
But I am yet to figure out how to make Team Explorer available to such users, inside Shell. So I am looking to find out the technical details of how that can be done.
I mean, I have a user, he installs my VS Shell application, he has no VStudio Team system on his machine. Now if I acquire CAL for TFS and install Team Explorer, do you think it will be automatically available in the VS Shell app?
Any ideas? have you worked on making this happen?
Thanks
It sounds like you are trying to allow the "special content creators" save files in TFS Source Control without having to buy them a license to a Visual Studio Team Edition -- correct me if I'm wrong.
If that's the case, unfortunately I believe that you can't quite do that. Your users still need a Client Access License ("CAL") to access TFS.
I think that you can acquire just CALs for your users without having to buy Visual Studio for them (I presume for less than a full blown Visual Studio would cost). At that point, you can just distribute to them the Team Explorer, which is a VS shell with nothing but TFS access components. That is available in your TFS server media.
I found this via Google. You might want to review it to decide your best options:
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Licensing White Paper
The only exception to the CAL rules I'm aware of is access to Work Items. Assuming properly licensed servers, anyone in your organization can create new Work Items or view and update existing ones created by them, using the Work Item Web Access component.
Just stumbled on this question, it might still be relevant to you.
You have the option of including the AnkhSVN (http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/) packages and load it into your Isolated Shell. While there are some issues around it, with Subversion support, you could use SvnBridge to access TFS repositories. This might bring you a little bit closer to the process you are trying to achieve.