Skip to main content

Coming soon(hopefully): TfPlugable, a solution to dynamically deploy plug-ins for TFS

Team Foundation Server always offered a rich extensibility model. It is very easy to create your extensions. The only problem was how to get these extensions to your users.

But this can change…

Martin Hinshelwood started the idea to simplify this process(think ‘NuGet for Team Foundation Server Extensions’). These are the key integration points he wants to cover:

  1. TF Job – These jobs can be schedules or one off and run within the context of the TFS Server Itself. They are a compiled DLL that has to be deployed to a particular folder on the TF Server in order to be loaded and registered with TFS.
  2. TF Event Sink – Events are fired on the TF Server as a result of Work Item, Build, Source Code changes and implement the ISubscriber interface. Again they need to have the containing DLL dropped into the correct folder on the TF Server.
  3. Custom Controls – Sometimes you want to extend the UI of work items capability to display data and this requires both server side and client side components to be deployed.
  4. Check-in Policy – These policies are evaluated at check-in both on the Client and on a Build Server as part of a Gated Check-in. They need to be registered in the system register to be executed but have no special folder.
  5. Soap Events – These are like TF Event Sinks but they are more disconnected from TFS. They do need to be registered with TFS, but it is a SOAP registration rather than integral to the server itself. With the introduction of TF Event Sinks there is little need for this, but if you want to have events from TFS 2008 or TFS 2010 then it may be a viable solution for backward compatibility.

I really like the idea. It would simplify my job a lot.

Hopefully we’ll see the first release appear soon…

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

VS Code Planning mode

After the introduction of Plan mode in Visual Studio , it now also found its way into VS Code. Planning mode, or as I like to call it 'Hannibal mode', extends GitHub Copilot's Agent Mode capabilities to handle larger, multi-step coding tasks with a structured approach. Instead of jumping straight into code generation, Planning mode creates a detailed execution plan. If you want more details, have a look at my previous post . Putting plan mode into action VS Code takes a different approach compared to Visual Studio when using plan mode. Instead of a configuration setting that you can activate but have limited control over, planning is available as a separate chat mode/agent: I like this approach better than how Visual Studio does it as you have explicit control when plan mode is activated. Instead of immediately diving into execution, the plan agent creates a plan and asks some follow up questions: You can further edit the plan by clicking on ‘Open in Editor’: ...
Read more