Team System: Customizing check-in policies

In the last three installments of this column, I explored the team Foundation Server (TFS) Versioning and work item tracking APIs. I used these APIs to build a Microsoft®word 2003 add-in that supports check-in and work item associations for Word documents, similar to the capabilities of Team Explorer in Visual studio®2005. In this installment, I'll delve into the check-in notes and policies. You'll learn how check-in notes work and how to write your own custom policy implementations. In a future column, I'll add this support to the Word add-in.

Check-in Notes and Policies

A check-in note is a free-form text field that you can use to add string data for a category to a check-in. Check-in notes are defined at the team project level and can be enforced as part of a check-in operation. The default project templates provided by Microsoft define three check-in notes: Code reviewers, security reviewers, and performance reviewers. None of them are mandatory; you can define your own check-in notes by using Team Explorer and/or APIs after you create the team project, or by modifying the Versioncontrol.xml file in the process template before you create the team project. When you define a check-in note, you define a label of up to 64 characters, specifying whether the description is required at check-in and specifying where the description will appear in the Check-in form. When checked in, the value of the description can contain up to 2048 + (230–1) characters. The first 2048 characters are stored in the nvarchar column of the database-any excess portions will be stored in the ntext columns.

The check-in policy enforces the rules defined by the team project administrator. Policies can be simple, such as making sure that you enter comments at check-in and can be complex, such as performing static code analysis and running tests. The 2005 version of TFS shipped with three policies. Subsequently, Microsoft has added four additional check-in policies as part of Microsoft Visual Studio's Foundation Server power Tool. Figure 1 provides detailed information about all seven policies. (Of course, it's "Tool" rather than "Tools".) See msdn2.microsoft.com/aa718351. ）

Figure 1 Microsoft-provided policies

Run the test specified by the policy test list before checking in. You can control the list of tests that the policy runs.

policy	release	policy requires
work item	rtm	at least one work item is associated with the check-in. There are no configuration options.
	rtm
test	rtm
Forbidden mode	power Tool
work item query	power td>
custom path	power /td>