I first presented at the Tulsa TechFest in 2007, the second year for the conference. Since then I have only missed presenting one or two times (that I can recall). My oldest son (12) was able to attend this year as well and he really enjoyed the Gaming/Dev/Design track! The conference is really done well. I recommend you check it out next year if you’re in the area.
This year, I had the pleasure to present two talks:
Using REST with VSTS & TFS
Team Foundation Server (TFS) has been around for over a decade now(!) and Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) has been around for several years. One of the reasons TFS/VSTS has been successful for so many years lies in the extensibility model provided by Microsoft. VSTS/TFS provides a large set of capabilities out of the box but no platform can be everything to everyone. With a rich extensibility model, however, you can shape, mold and extend VSTS/TFS to suit your organization’s specific needs. In this talk, we will cover the rich set of REST APIs that Microsoft provides for extending VSTS/TFS. We will take a look at the capabilities that are currently available as well as address some of the features that have yet to make it into the REST APIs. We’ll take a look at some code examples and patterns that make it easy to integrate with the REST APIs so you can quickly get up and running with your own customizations.
Building Extensions in VSTS & TFS
Have you ever customized VSTS/TFS and made it do something really awesome that wasn’t possible in the out of the box experience? Have you ever created something so cool that you’d like to share it? Maybe even monetize it? Maybe you have an idea on how to better the experience in VSTS/TFS but don’t know where to start? In this talk, we’ll discuss the various ways you can make use of custom extensions in VSTS/TFS. We’ll talk about what can be customized within an extension and what can’t We’ll go over some patterns for getting an extension up and running quickly as well as some tips and tricks on debugging extensions and getting them deployed.
Although I tweeted the links for the slides after my talks I thought I’d go ahead and post them here since tweets are fairly short-lived ;-)
Also, if you’re curious, the template I used was purchased from PresenterMedia, here.
If you have any questions regarding the slides, or about VSTS APIs or Extensions in general, feel free to ask in the comments section below!