Team Foundation Server 2013 Customization Paperback – January 21, 2014

The TFS 2013 Customization book has some great content and ideas around how to make Team Foundation Server 2013 work for you, but overall is a bit of a missed opportunity to be something great – kind of like teasing you with a movie trailer that is fantastic, holding true to it during viewing of the movie, but not quite delivering on a phenomenal film. It could be great, but requires some tweaks and enhancements.There is quite a bit to like in the guide. The author discusses some best practices in customizations, talks about JavaScript plug-ins, which I hadn’t seen documented before, includes tips on testing in staging and using TypeScript for plug-ins, discusses reasons for a plug-in over custom check-in policy, and talks about server-side plug-ins and their caveats. A very good surface skim on customizing TFS, filling a void that would have otherwise continued empty. Kudos to the author for getting a book out on this topic!There is also quite a bit of room for improvement, which will hopefully be incorporated into the next edition when a new version of TFS surfaces.The first issue is that the book lacks details for each of the customizations. My overall list is too large to share here, but to give a few examples: no mention of customizing states and transitions in process templates, no mention of best practices around customizing process templates (like storing in source control and branching), missing “why’s” around many of the customization topics (e.g. why process template editor vs. XML, why is there a #700 in the build process parameters, etc.), how to thoroughly test and troubleshoot the customizations, best practices for deploying custom controls, strategy for finding the right w3wp process when debugging, and assumed background knowledge for the code samples.Secondly, although I appreciate the links the author provided to more information, I often read a book to get the complete picture and not jump around to other sites. Furthermore, I read the book offline so I didn’t have the opportunity to explore the links anyway. It got me thinking about the format of the book, and in the end it felt like a set of somewhat disjoint blog postings as opposed to an end-to-end customization guide. Perhaps in the future, a core customization scenario for company XYZ could be described and then the book takes you through all of those customizations where everything fits together.Thirdly, the content felt like a bit of a missed opportunity. The author is obviously very knowledgeable with TFS, but providing additional content and context such as additional real-world process template scenarios, additional value-add with scripts perhaps with a useful library/framework, and covering additional customizations that are not well documented elsewhere, such as examples of using process template rules.In summary, if you are new to customizing Team Foundation Server, this is a good place to get started. The book walks the reader through the customization with some nice screenshots presenting context. However, the “why” behind a lot of the activities is missing and I’m afraid there isn’t enough information here to really go off and easily create your own customizations without referencing a fairly significant set of companion materials. The groundwork for the book is there and I believe the author has more to share from his experiences – the book feels like it was rushed for publication and omits some details.

This book is a concentrated well of information on how to customize TFS 2013, specifically customization which is great for the Admins that only want to know how to do that and not have all the other stuff about TFS that they may already know about.It contains information on process template customization which is usually the no 1. thing customer want to do with their system since the out-of-the-box templates don't have fields that they need for their business. It then covers how to customize the Backlog boards, also of interest how to create a javascript plug-in.Chapter 3 dives into how to add custom controls to work items and how to deploy them on each developers machine. Although this has been possible since version 2005, I'm not a fan of doing this because of the deployment problems it can create. You have to do both for VS and for the Web and maintain in sync for all versions of VS in your infrastructure.Chapter 4 dives into server plug-ins which are super powerful and can be used for validation and also to start jobs after the action takes place like after a check-in or if a work item is changed. The author also explains how to debug those plug-in which is an added bonus.Chapter 5 cover how to add a scheduled job to the TFS Job service. Again very concise and to the point also showing how to debug. I'll admit to not having done this kind of customization in the past but it's good that it's covered in this book.Finally the last chapter goes into details on how to modify the XAML build template I would have wanted a section on using PowerShell in the pre and post build as an alternative to modifying the XAML since this is what I recommend my customer do these days but If you are looking at how to do this, this will work for previous version of TFS Build as well.All in all a good bug on customization at a very fair price.Etienne Tremblay ALM MVP since 2005.

In this book you can find several topics about customizations allowed in TFS: work items, web interface, custom controls, server plugins, scheduled jobs, builds; ach of them is written fluently, and provides you a good overview (a bit more!) of all topics with lot of usefull screenshots, and step-by-step descriptions.It doesn't become overwhelming with lot of details that you might not be interested in.It provides what you need to discover and lean what solutions are possible and shows you how to do it,ie: UI javascript vs server customization, new controls (development, debug, install, uninstall).Everything in one single book, more than a simple collection, without looking for all of them through lot of sources.Good as starting point, it introduce you to TFS's customization options, so you can choose easily and quickly the solution to your needs, and even try yourself for it

Covers a wide range of area's without being overwhelming. The examples are valuable and spot on for practical use with a 2013 installation. Think of it as a kick start to your abilities with TFS 2013.

Gordon has written a comprehensive guide to TFS 2013 Customization. Gordon has a straightforward, easy-to-read writing style.The book covers a wide range of customization topics and options. Each are clearly explained with many explanatory images and explanations.I highly recommend this book.I especially like that the book can be purchased in electronic (mobi) format.[...]

For the price this is an absolute rip-off. Costing around £16 you only get 78 pages!The content is more like a collection of Internet articles which have been reformatted to fit into the pages of a book. There is NO detail in any of the "how to" guides. They consist of how to create a project, name the class, set some properties and then how to upload the customisation. There is NO references section, no even a single link to MSDN or online articles (nope, not one!). There is no explaination of what the properties do or why they should be set to a particular value.Even the customisations themselves aren't worth doing. For example, why would you want to notify your Twitter account that a build worked? The author seems more comfortable using the Twitter API than actually the target audience - those people who build software. The "ZIP" part of the same customisation comes from using the new .NET ZipFile class (a single line of code) but this is not mentioned and no references given.Very, Very, Very disappointing book.

I agree with the previous review. Like all other Packt books I've read so far, it has no substance. A collection of recipes from the Internet.Disappointed? No. But this book absolutely doesn't worth it's price.