What Everybody Ought to Know about the TFS SDK

If you’ve checked out the latest Visual Studio SDK, you may have noticed something relative to the previous releases:

SDK Release	Download (MB)
Visual Studio 2005	124
Visual Studio 2008	109
Visual Studio 2010	10

So, where’d the other hundred megabytes go? On-line – that’s where. The latest Visual Studio SDK really only contains the core content necessary to build new VSIP packages and other extensibility projects. All of the documentation and samples have been moved to their new home on MSDN Code Gallery.

Of course, that includes the Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2 SDK samples and documentation. It also includes a starter set of code snippets which aren’t full-on samples, but give users programming against our object model quick, narrowly scoped answers to common implementation questions. Lastly, there’s a compiled HTML help (CHM) file that provides some basic documentation on our client object model.

What’s the Plan for the SDK?

We currently have half of the samples that shipped with TFS 2008 RTM updated for 2010 Beta 2 and published to Code Gallery. Due to some recent API changes, these will require additional updating prior to RTM. The remaining work is as follows:

• Finish updating remaining samples and publish to Code Gallery
• Review XML documentation comments in public object model API
• Coordinate with our technical writers to deliver API documentation for MSDN
• Identify, author and publish new samples and snippets as appropriate

If there are particular samples or snippets that you’d like to see, post a comment or drop me a line.