Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server

How To: Create Custom Check-in Policies in Visual Studio
Team Foundation Server
Applies To
• Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 Team Foundation Server (TFS)
• Microsoft Visual Studio Team System
Summary
This How To article walks you through the process of creating, registering, and applying
a custom check-in policy for TFS. Check-in polices allow you to run rules whenever a
developer attempts to check-in a source file, in order to ensure that the source file being
checked-in meets a specified set of criteria. As an example, this How To article uses a
custom policy to enforce that check-in comments are supplied with all check-ins. To
implement a custom check-in policy, you create a class that derives from PolicyBase and
implements the IPolicyDefinition and IPolicyEvaluation interfaces. You register the
policy assembly in the Microsoft Windows® registry and you apply the policy to your
team project.
Contents
• Objectives
• Overview
• Before You Begin
• Summary of Steps
• Step 1 – Create and Build a Custom Policy Class.
• Step 2 – Register the Custom Policy Class in the Windows Registry
• Step 3 – Apply the Custom Policy.
• Step 4 – Validate the Custom Policy.
• Additional Considerations
Objectives
• Learn what a custom check-in policy is
• Learn how to create, register, and apply custom check-in policies.
Overview
Check-in policies enforce constraints whenever files are checked into source control.
Team Foundation Server provides a number of out-of-box check-in policies including
policies to check that unit tests have run and been passed, policies to perform static code
analysis to ensure that code meets coding standards and .NET guidelines, and policies to
check that work items are associated with check ins. The Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
Team Foundation Power Tool also provides a number of additional check-in policies. In
this How To article, you will learn how to create, register, and apply a custom policy. The