TFS2010 Automatic folder structure

Question

I want to use TFS as a project repository; I had very good experience with SVN, CVS. But I'm not sure how to do this with TFS2010.

I have the following collections

• CUSTOMERS (Contains customers and their products)
• PRODUCTS (Contains baselines)

Note that:

• I have several clients.
• Several customers may have several different solutions (.SLN),
• Each solution can have multiple .PRJ files.

QUESTION 1: I want the folder structure of the project to be created automatically. How? Is there a script / addon / functional / even the ability to achieve this in TFS?

Every time a new customer comes for a product; I want:

• The following folder structure to be created automatically (I did this using CVS and SVN)
• Place an order for a product from PRODUCTS and check the solution files in the CUSTOMERS collection.

x

 CUSTOMER 1 --------PRODUCT 1 ----------------Management artifacts (.docx, xlsx, .vsd, .mpp files) ----------------Design (.vsd files mostly) ----------------References (Any help files provided by the customer) ----------------Requirements artifacts (.docx, xlsx) ----------------Development ------------------------Solution Files (.SLN) --------------------------------PRJ 1 --------------------------------PRJ 2 (Referenced in 1) --------------------------------PRJ 3 (Referenced in 1) --------------------------------PRJ n (Not referenced, standalone tool) ----------------Testing and QA artifacts ----------------User guide artifacts ----------------Deployment artifacts ......................................................... --------PRODUCT 2 --------PRODUCT n CUSTOMER 2 ......................................................... CUSTOMER n 

QUESTION 2: Is this folder structure even realistic in terms of TFS (since TFS mainly focuses on solutions and VS IDEs)?

Please note that we are a small store of 20+ developers; Thank you very much in advance!

Answer 1

To save office documents, you can use Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), you can configure the structure:

First you need to download the process template. Lunch VS.NET, click on the menu Team / Team Project Collections Settings / Process Template Download Manager ... In the Windows SharePoint Services folder containing the WssTasks.xml file, you will find the same sample to add folders to it:

 <documentLibraries> <documentLibrary name="Shared Documents" description="Shared Documents"/> </documentLibraries> <folders> <folder documentLibrary="My Custom Folder" name="My Custom Folder"/> </folders> 

A key advantage of this approach is providing each user access to documents, and not just vs .net owners.

Answer 2

I have the same requirement a few years ago. I created a PowerShell script that automatically creates a "graceful project structure".

In TFS, you need to think about various components. SourceControl is only one part of TFS, and only one part of TeamProject.

First, I would say that you could create 2 collective collectible projects

• of customers
• Products

So you can share all things. It is also physically separated. Each TeamProjectCollection (tpc) has its own repository. Each of them requires its own building infrastructure.

You can configure TFS project templates to automatically create such a folder structure in the source item for each new project. but I think you are missing some of the ALM features and concepts that TFS offers you.

You should look at WorkItems and reporting around these WorkItems. ALM was the main focus in TFS 2010, so there is a lot of new ...