Set up a TFS Server/Service demo environment in less than 1 minute now!

To Demonstrate the capabilities of TFS 2012 Server/Service Task board you would need to set up TFS with some teams, a few team members, some sample stories, tasks, etc. That’s too many steps if you as me!

Hi! My name is Tarun Arora, I am a Microsoft MVP in Visual Studio ALM and a Visual Studio ALM Ranger, as a consultant I have had to demo TFS Preview to potential customers several times a day. I usually create the team project during the demo to show off how quick and efficient it is, but setting up teams, team members, tasks usually takes longer I don’t prefer carrying out these steps during the demo. I have developed a .net based console application which uses the TFS API to create a standard demo environment saving me from all these manual steps. The console application reads the set up information from an XML file, leaving the setup process highly customizable.

Figure 1 – Demo Dictionary, change values here for unique setup

The console application today sets up,

  1. Create a new Team
  2. Set the team as the default team
  3. Configure team settings
    • Set Backlog Iteration path
    • Set Team Iterations and start & finish dates
    • Set Team Area path
  4. Add Team Members
  5. Add Work Item queries to Team Favorites
  6. Add Product Backlog Items & linked Tasks and assign to sprint & team members

How Do I use the application?

Please see a detailed walkthrough on how to use this tool here.

Known Issues

  1. If you try and add users in the DemoDictionary.xml that are currently not added to your team project collection then you will get a message "User <username> not found". The tool currently only allows you to add those users to the teams that are already part of the team project collection.
  2. If you try and assign a work item to a user that is not part of the team project collection then a new work item is created but not assigned to any user, the work item Id is written out as console output for convenience. 
  3. The application will thrown an exception if you try and re-create a team with the same name that already exists in a team project. 

Credits,

Enjoy!