VSTS - Of APIs, Tools and UIs
Recently I have been working with TFS and VSTS quite a bit. One
of the biggest learnings I have made is that what you see is not what you get,
you get a lot more. What do I mean by this?
Well, if all what you focused on what the user interface
provided by Visual Studio there is quite a bit you could me missing out on. This
applies not just to the server portions (TFS) but to the client portions as
well. The one example that resonates best is source control.
There are a bunch of stuff you can do with the UI but when
you start to look at tf.exe you realize that there is stuff that is not exposed
through the UI. These include things like baseless merges or doing a recursive
history on a folder. In order to get full value you need to take a good look at
tf.exe and see what additional things can be accomplished.
In some cases certain tasks are not exposed through a UI at
all. For example TFS allows you to subscribe to events. A portion of this is
available through the UI for email alerts but the process of hooking up an
event to some subscribers requires the use of bissubscribe.
And that is not the end of it. These tools are all built on
an API where you can build your own apps. Check out this entry
where a list of files for review is extracted using code. Have a look at this post
for another example.
The moral of the story – spend some time checking out the
command line tools and understand that TFS is more than a product, it is a
platform where you can extend it to provide you a lot more goodies.