Professional Team Foundation Server

12.5. Team Foundation Version Control Extensibility

Extensibility has been a constant theme throughout this book concerning Team Foundation Server, and Team Foundation Version Control is no exception. TFVC gives you the ability to build your own custom check-in policies, allowing you to implement your specific organization rules concerning how items are checked into the repository. As well, TFVC makes use of the Team Foundation Server Object Model. While you won't learn much about that in this chapter, you make use of it in future chapters where continuous integration and Team Build are discussed. Finally, Microsoft has provided a MSSCCI Provider for Team Foundation Version Control, allowing you to access TFVC from older development environments, such as Visual Studio 2003. This allows you to take advantage of the version control system in Team Foundation Server, without having to immediately port all your development over to Visual Studio 2005.

12.5.1. Custom Check-In Policies

One of the nice things about check-in policies is that you can create your own for almost any situation for which you want to write some code. Basically, a custom check-in policy is just a managed .NET assembly containing one or more classes. These classes are added to the Windows Registry, allowing Team Foundation Server Version Control to find and manage the check-in policies. The Visual Studio SDK has some detailed documentation concerning creating a custom check-in policy.

Included with the code for ...