integrating external systems with TFS

Recently, we need to integrate external systems with TFS. TFS is a feature-rich system and has a large API. The TFS sample on MSDN only scratch the top surface. Fortunately, a couple of good blog posts get me on the write direction:

• Team Foundation Version Control client API example for TFS 2010 and newer
• Team Foundation Server API: Programmatically Downloading Files From Source Control

The key is to use the VersionControlService. We need to reference the following assemblies:

Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.dll

Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.dll

Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client.dll

Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Common.dll

The code would be something like:

using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Common;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Client;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client;

...

TfsTeamProjectCollection pc = TfsTeamProjectCollectionFactory.GetTeamProjectCollection(tfsUri);
VersionControlServer vcs = pc.GetService();

Then to check whether a file exists, we can use:

vcs.ServerItemExists(myPath, ItemType.File)

Or check if a directory exists:

vcs.ServerItemExists(myPath, ItemType.Folder)

To get a list of directories or files, we can use the GetItems method. TFS is far more complicated than a file system. We can get a file, get the history of a file, get a changeset, etc. Therefore, the GetItems method has many overloads. To get a list files, we can use:

var fileSet = vcs.GetItems(myPath, VersionSpec.Latest, RecursionType.OneLevel, DeletedState.NonDeleted, ItemType.File);
foreach (Item f in fileSet.Items)
{
    Console.WriteLine(f.ServerItem);
}

Or get a list of directories:

var dirSet = vcs.GetItems(myPath, VersionSpec.Latest, RecursionType.OneLevel, DeletedState.NonDeleted, ItemType.Folder);
foreach (Item d in dirSet.Items)
{
    Console.WriteLine(d.ServerItem);
}