Streamlined: Extending Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management

I've been working on streamlining some content in an effort to make it easier for you to get the information that you need. The first place I did this was in the Team Foundation SDK, in Extending Team Foundation and Extending Work Item Tracking. I'm looking at doing the same thing for Extending Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management. Here's the topic in it's streamlined form. I'd like to hear back from anyone who uses the APIs for VSALM and Team Foundation to learn whether this works well for you, compared to the previous version. Any other feedback on this topic is also welcome, of course. For example, I think that it's clear that this topic could use a more thorough discussion of the API set for ALM as a whole.

Allen

Extending Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management 

You can customize some aspects of Visual Studio to extend existing features or to add new capabilities if you have special requirements. For example, you might define new test conditions for database unit tests if the test conditions provided with Visual Studio Premium or Visual Studio Ultimate are not sufficient to address your requirements.

Some of the extensibility points are provided with your Visual Studio installation. For other extensibility points, you must also install the Visual Studio SDK. You can identify the specific requirements for each extensibility point in the content that supports that extensibility point.

Team Foundation

• Extending Team Foundation
  • Connect to Team Foundation Server from a Console Application
  • Extending Work Item Tracking by Using the Client Object Model for Team Foundation
  • Extending Version Control
  • Events
  • Warehouse and Reports
• Client Object Model Reference
• Server Object Model Reference

IntelliTrace

• API Reference for IntelliTrace Extensibility

Database features

• Extending the Database Features of Visual Studio
  • Create Custom Database Refactoring Types or Targets
  • Create and Register Additional Rules for Analyzing Database Code
  • Generate Specialized Test Data with a Custom Data Generator
  • Define Custom Conditions for Database Unit Tests
  • Customize Database Build and Deployment by Using Build and Deployment Contributors
  • Create Custom Features for Database Projects
  • How to: Register and Manage Feature Extensions
  • How to: Distribute Custom Feature Extensions to Team Members
• Troubleshooting Feature Extensions
• API Reference for Database Features of Visual Studio

Testing

• Creating and Using Custom Plug-ins for Load and Web Performance Tests
  • How to: Use the Load test API
  • How to: Create a Load Test Plug-in
  • How to: Use the Web Performance Test API
  • How to: Create a Web Performance Test Plug-In
  • How to: Create a Request-level Plug-in
  • How to: Create a Web Service Test
  • How to: Create a Recorder Plug-in
  • How to: Create a Custom HTTP Body Editor for the Web Performance Test Editor
  • How to: Create a Visual Studio Add-in for the Web Performance Test Results Viewer
• API Reference for Testing Tools for Visual Studio ALM

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 09, 2010
  I'm like to see the following examples:1) Workitems Create a Workitem grid control - see here: social.msdn.microsoft.com/.../2ad25b7e-4fca-4258-925b-0de96f100de12) Testing - Create test plans/test suites via the AIP3) Testing - Modify/Customize test plans/test suites
• Anonymous
  November 09, 2010
  Anything having to do with IntelliTrace is a win for me.  I'm not sure if this is out of scope but I would love to see some better info for Lab Management.  I still feel that the Test Manager docs could be improved.  That being said, I'm stoked to look into all of this stuff!
• Anonymous
  November 18, 2010
  Allen, thanks for the ideas for samples. We'll consider these as we develop new samples (which I'd like to spend more time doing).
• Anonymous
  January 23, 2011
  On the Extending Team Foundation page, the Eventing Service link in the Server Object Model section goes to 2008 documentation, which is either irrelevant or misleading.Has someone forgotten to update the link or are the 2010 pages not there yet?
• Anonymous
  January 29, 2011
  I'd love to see some additional API examples for extending the Coded UI infrastructure.  Each time I run into a limitation, I hear "You can just extend the framework to get that."  But that information is, at the moment, a hard to find, making the whole Coded UI extension proposition somewhat of a black art.
• Anonymous
  January 30, 2011
  Steven, did you look at the example in this topic? msdn.microsoft.com/.../ff398055.aspx (Extending Coded UI Tests and Action Recordings to Support Microsoft Excel)?