TFS Client side hook

Question

We have using TFS as version control. Currently the project management is done through our local PMS application. We have a requirement like when a team member check in the project, show a custom dialog for entering task details and update our local pms database. I want to show a custom dialog box that and/or after the check-in command is invoked. Also ensure that only successful submission of task details through this custom dialog boxes, we can checkin the projects.

Answer 1

Creating your own checkin policy

You can do this through a Check-in policy. Check out my blog post on interacting with the user on check-in. The basic trick is to raise a check-in warning which the user can click, on the click event, you can show UI to the user and use standard Windows Forms functionality to interact with your system.

The most basic example code can be found in this StackOverflow question.

My multiple Branch policy uses this trick to ask a user to confirm whether the user really wants to check in code to multiple branches at the same time without having to use the bypass policy validation checkbox.

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A note on installing Checkin policies

After configuring the Team project to use the checkin policy, Visual Studio will complain when the policy is not installed on the machine upon checkin. There is no easy way to distribute checkin policies to ensure that every user has it installed on their machine, or will automatically get it installed from TFS.

In your checkin policy you can provide a URI to the location of the policy package through the IPolicyDefinition.InstallationInstructions. The package can be a .msi, a .vsix or just a zip file with a script to copy the assembly and add the required registry key. Visual Studio doesn't care about the method you choose. If your company hosts their own Visual Studio gallery, it could point to the download location there as well.

If you pick an .msi you could have them distributed through existing provisioning tools that might be available in your organisation.

Clients that do not have the policy installed will automatically trigger a warning on checkin that can only be dismissed by checking the "bypass checkin policy" checkbox. That permission can be revoked, requiring all users to setup their machine correctly.

There is one more way to distribute checkin policies, which is through the Visual Studio Power tools. By checkin in the policies in Source Control in a specific folder and telling the Power Tools to download custom binaries (work item controls and checkin polciies), they will be installed automatically. Since these tools are not installed by default, not configured by default they need about the same amount of work to make this scenario work for you.