Among the goodies Microsoft released for developers at its TechEd 2011 conference is a new Java software development kit for the Microsoft Team Foundation Server solution.
ATLANTA-As part of its batch
of developer-related announcements at the
TechEd
2011 conference here, Microsoft announced a new Java software development
kit for its Team Foundation Server
product.
The Team Foundation Server SDK for Java includes documentation, samples and
redistributable components to help developers create software products
that integrate with Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010.
In a
May
16 blog post on the SDK, Brian Harry, a Microsoft technical fellow and
product unit manager for TFS, said, "Now you
will be able to extend TFS using Java just
as easily as you can with .NET. This
is going to enable teams using Team Explorer Everywhere to fully customize
their development environment - in Eclipse or outside. Further, we have a
few 3rd party ISVs that are in the process of adding TFS
support to their software offerings using our new SDK. Their feedback has
been great in helping make sure we have a solid and easy-to-use SDK. Stay
tuned in the coming weeks and months for news of these new partners."
Moreover,
Harry said:
The
TFS
SDK for Java includes the following:
-
A
redistributable JAR file containing the TFS API's. This is a the same Java code that is used by Team Explorer Everywhere in
the TFS plug-in for Eclipse and the
Cross-platform command line client. It provides access to version
control, work item tracking, build and other functionality in TFS
from your own Java based application. We ship this as a single JAR
file containing all the code and Java dependencies to make is easy to include
in your own applications.
-
The
native code libraries used by the TFS API.
We have a small amount of JNI code in the API
to handle functionality that is not natively supported in Java on all the
platforms that we support (such as access to Kerberos for authentication, or
integrating with Keychain on the Mac). We are making this native code
available, also redistributable and compiled for Windows (x86, x64), Mac
(Universal), Linux(x86, x64, ppc), HP-UX (ia64_32, pa_risc), Solaris(sparc,
x86, x64) and AIX (ppc).
-
Full API
documentation in Javadoc format. This is the same code documentation used
by our developers, written by our developers.
-
Code
Samples. The team are very aware that getting started with this large code base
can be quite a challenge, therefore they have put together a bunch of sample
code to try and get you started.
In addition, "From day one we have wanted TFS
to be an open platform upon which anyone can build their favorite development
experiences," Harry said in his post. "This SDK for Java is an important
milestone for us in ensuring equal access to the same API's
that we have developed for our own use and will hopefully enable many people to
build on our platform. It's also further evidence that we are serious
about building a great ALM solution for truly heterogeneous teams. I'm
very excited to see what people are going to do with the SDK."
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