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.”