How to retrieve a list of Changesets (or work items) that were checked-in between builds ?

Question

I need a list of changesets (or Work Items) that were made betweend builds (I can label builds if its necessary). I need that list for our test team (and to publish 'changelist')

Is MSBuild task able to retrieve that list and save as file (then I can process that list further.
Or maybe I need to connect to TFS from C# code and retrieve that list myself (I'm familiar with retrieving WorkItems in C#)

Regards,
Lukas

Answer 1

We do something similar in our TFS Build process. To do this we created a MSBuild custom task in C# that makes the call to TFS for the items. It is pretty straight forward to create the custom tasks.

Here is an article to get you started with writing MSBuild tasks. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/t9883dzc.aspx

I assume you already know how to do the calls to TFS based on your question.

Answer 2

TFS will automatically produce a list of all change sets and associated work items checked-in between two successful builds. You will find the lists at the end of the build report.

You could set up a build that is used to communicate with the testers. When that build is build successfully the testers could just look at the build report to see what work items and change sets has been committed since the last build.

If you set up an event listener for the build quality property of a build you could send an email alert to the testers when that builds quality filed changes to a specific version.

Answer 3

This blog post may be what you are looking for. You basically go through all the links finding ones with a Uri containing 'changeset'. There doesn't seem to be a specific property for this.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckh/archive/2006/08/12/artifact-uri-to-changeset.aspx

(copied from blog in case of rot)

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;

using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client;

class ChangesetsFromWorkItems
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        if (args.Length < 2)
        {
            Console.Error.Write("Usage: ChangesetsFromWorkItems <server> <workitemid> [workitemid...]");
            Environment.Exit(1);
        }

        TeamFoundationServer server = TeamFoundationServerFactory.GetServer(args[0]);
        WorkItemStore wiStore = (WorkItemStore)server.GetService(typeof(WorkItemStore));
        VersionControlServer vcs = (VersionControlServer) server.GetService(typeof(VersionControlServer));

        int workItemId;
        for (int i = 1; i < args.Length; i++)
        {
            if (!int.TryParse(args[i], out workItemId))
            {
                Console.Error.WriteLine("ignoring unparseable argument {0}", args[i]);
                continue;
            }

            WorkItem workItem = wiStore.GetWorkItem(workItemId);
            List<Changeset> associatedChangesets = new List<Changeset>();
            foreach (Link link in workItem.Links)
            {
                ExternalLink extLink = link as ExternalLink;
                if (extLink != null)
                {
                    ArtifactId artifact = LinkingUtilities.DecodeUri(extLink.LinkedArtifactUri);
                    if (String.Equals(artifact.ArtifactType, "Changeset", StringComparison.Ordinal))
                    {
                        // Convert the artifact URI to Changeset object.
                        associatedChangesets.Add(vcs.ArtifactProvider.GetChangeset(new Uri(extLink.LinkedArtifactUri);
                    }
                }
            }

            // Do something with the changesets.  Changes property is an array, each Change
            // has an Item object, each Item object has a path, download method, etc.
        }
    }
}