TFS As A Service (TFSPreview.com) - Connect to and Query Using C#

Having worked with every version of Team Foundation Server (TFS) since its inception I was keen to see what API support "TFSPreview.com" has. The good news is that (at time of blogging) the API accessibility is all there, is free and aligns with the on-premise API and client object model.

I've always felt the strongly-typed client object model and library is a strength of the TFS offering over many of its competitors and the classes that compose it provide some good extensibility possibilities - I've been on a project where all "Requirements" work item types from an MSF Agile project were exported via the API to a Word document and formatted for presentation to the customer (and we could re-run it any time!)

This past week has seen the RTM availability for a bunch of Microsoft products including Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2012, which means that an RTM set of the TFS Client Object Model assemblies are now available. After grabbing them I fired up Visual Studio, added in the correct references and was able to connect to our TFS Preview instance and perform some query magic.

Here's an (incomplete) sample of how easy it is!

// Add the namespaces. Make sure it's version 11.0.0.0!
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client;

// some time later in your code... // this code assumes the user who owns the current thread has previously authorised against the server
using (TfsTeamProjectCollection tpc = new TfsTeamProjectCollection(new Uri("https://yourinstance.tfspreview.com/defaultcollection"), new TfsClientCredentials()))
{
  var workItemService = tpc.GetService<WorkItemStore>();
  var queryString = "Select [State], [Title] From WorkItems Where [System.TeamProject] = @TeamProject and [Work Item Type] = @Type and [Assigned to ] = @Me";
  var variables = new Dictionary() { {"Type","Task"}, {"TeamProject", "YOURPROJECT"} };
  var query = new Query(workItemService, queryString, variables);
  WorkItemCollection results = query.RunQuery();
}

So the above is just a simple and incomplete example - but it will connect and return results for you. The TFS extensibility options are pretty wide and varied as can be seen on MSDN! I'll post more stuff up here over time as I work through my planned use of this server (a custom team board in our office... too big perhaps, but hey...).

If you don't have a TFSPreview account I'd recommend getting one and having a play - Microsoft has said the platform will be free through until the end of 2012 so I'd say there's no better way to try it out than that. They are also shipping updates for the platform every 3 weeks which will be ahead of the on-premise version which will get quarterly updates (based on the TFSPreview updates). Get in and get informed.