Opening a file from TFS using the full TFS Path, from a web site

Question

So I have a website running that displays full path of a TFS File on the page somewhere, I want the user to be able to click on it, which should then open up that file from TFS inside their Visual Studio.

The command to do this inside Visual Studio is "File.TfsOpenFromSourceControl" (DTE command) - it's basically the user manually going to that file using the Source control explorer and double clicking to open it up.

I am wanting to simulate that action from my web app inside the browser.

Update: The Web app is a pure ASPNet MVC app with Jquery available to it. I am already showing the file's content to the user in the web app. But I want the user to open the same file in Visual studio, by clicking on the file path in the web app. The question is more of Browser to VS integration and how to execute the DTE command in question, from within the web app context of the browser.

Any clues would be helpful

Answer 1

I don't know the answer to Pavel's question, so I'll sketch an outline of both solutions.

• If you want to display the file inside the browser, call the Item.DownloadFile() API. NB: in 2008 SP1 there is another overload of this method that allows streaming into a memory buffer instead of writing directly to the filesystem. If you don't already work with Item objects directly, you can retrieve them via the GetItem() / GetItems() APIs.

• If you want to make the file open in VS, there are a couple approaches. Perhaps your web app already includes the concept of local workspace(s) for the user, similar to Source Control Explorer. If so, you'd simply call Workspace.GetLocalItemForServerItem() to find the local path of the item, then ShellExecute it. (Or maybe pass it as a command line parameter to devenv.exe, if it's not natively associated with VS.) If not, you can either create a temporary workspace on behalf of the user, or use the same DownloadFile() API shown before; stream the contents to the client over a web service, save to disk, then launch VS as before.

Naturally, the more involved scenarios under option #2 will require deeper OS integration than the DOM / Javascript can provide. Would help to know if this web app is already built on ActiveX, Flash, Silverlight, XBAP, or similar technology...