Chapter 9: Customizing and Extending Team System

Chapter 9

Customizing and Extending Team System

Extensibility is one of the key features of Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Team System, and it's inevitable that developers, architects, testers, and project managers will want to customize the out-of-the-box features. In addition, Microsoft's partners are preparing tools that plug into Team System and complement the basic Team System offering. For this reason, Team System has been built from the ground up to ensure that its fundamental architecture supports customization and extension.

Microsoft knew that the success of Team System would not be based on how well it could anticipate the specific needs of all the development teams in the world. The built-in methodologies, work item types, policies, and reports support most of the development efforts in today's industry; however, the success of Team System lies in how well it can be adapted to work for specific teams, in specific environments, for specific projects.

Customizing Team System can include something as trivial as modifying a work item type to include an additional field or creating a new report. Extending Team System can include building new clients and/or Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server extensions to enable new tools, workflows, or policies. Before we move ahead, let's discuss the differences between customizing and extending.