Tfs Automation - Automatically creating queries when new areas are created

Our testers got sick of setting up new queries whenever they created a new area in TFS so asked me if I could automate it.
The solution is broken into 2 parts:

AreaCreatedSubscriber

This is ISubscriber that watches for StructureChangedNotification events and queues a one time job to create the queries.
The reason I queued a job instead of just doing the work in this plugin was that when creating the query TFS was throwing an exception on validation (TF51011: The specified area path does not exist.) It seems that there is a slight delay between adding areas and them becoming valid for use in queries. I thought it was a caching issue but even when explicitly clearing the cache on the workitemstore it still happens, I found a post (New Area Path values are not available in work items) that suggested that tfs subscribes to its own events which then triggers a process of making the area available. This meant I needed to delay the creation of the queries until after all the events had completed, hence the job queue.
Also it is fairly good practice to push any event semi long running tasks into a job as it can delay actions for end users.
This gets installed to c:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 11.0\Application Tier\Web Services\bin\Plugins

CreateDefaultQueriesJob

The second part is the actual job, its also fairly simple (although crudely written). It reads the Area path out of the event data and creates a folder hierarchy for the queries to live in. It then checks if the queries already exist and if not creates them.
This job should probably be extended/cleanedup to read the queries from an external source, whether it be a WIQL file on the disk, some metadata stored on the team project, or just a special folder in source control.
This is installed into c:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 11.0\Application Tier\TFSJobAgent\plugins

Debugging

I had a bunch of issues trying to get this to work.
Firstly the TF51011 error - folders were appearing in the shared queries so I knew the plugin was doing something, luckily the exception was being logged to the event logs so it was really easy to find.
After moving the logic to a one time job I tried testing it only to find nothing happened. No folders created and nothing logged in the event logs. I figured that the event was still being fired so it was probably queueing the job, after a quick google I came across a blog article from Martin Hinshelwood debugging the TFS Active directory sync job this gave me a bunch of helpful debugging tips.
This lead me to the tfs project collection database
SELECT * FROM [Tfs_Enlighten].[dbo].[tbl_JobDefinition] where ExtensionName like '%CreateDefaultQueriesJob'
Returned rows but they weren't much help, jobs were being queued but I had no idea about if they were successful or not. I eventually discovered another table in the tfs_configuration database which contained the jobHistory
select * from tfs_configuration.dbo.tbl_JobHistory where jobid in (SELECT [JobId] FROM [Tfs_Enlighten].[dbo].[tbl_JobDefinition] where ExtensionName like '%CreateDefaultQueriesJob')
Also had one row for every time I queued the job, with the status result of 6, this time I needed to do some diving with ILSpy, which lead me to this enum

ExtensionNotFound = 6 - TFS couldn't find my job! I double and triple checked all my code, and started diving through the JobRunner code in TFS trying to figure out why it wasn't loading. I noticed a few hints of MEF in the code so tried adding an [Export] attribute to the class, still no luck. Enabling the trace log by editing c:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 11.0\Application Tier\TFSJobAgent\TfsJobAgent.exe.config I started seeing a curious exception about a plugin being added to a dictionary twice.

Especially interesting as it appears to check if the plugin is already registered in the dictionary before adding it, which makes me think they have a threading bug.
After removing the [Export] attribute and restarting the tfs job service a few times it seemed to come right.

Update: Apparently there's some new web access interfaces to view the status of TFS Jobs (and more), may have meant less database diving had I known at the time

Tfs Automation - Create Builds Automatically for New Solutions

I recently wrote a tfs server plugin that creates new builds automatically whenever you add or branch a solution file.  It's fairly simple, but worth sharing.

It takes advantage of another piece of code I had previously written (or perhaps found online, I honestly can't remember now) to create builds using the TFS api.

Installing it is very simple, just build the class into an assembly and copy it to c:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 11.0\Application Tier\Web Services\bin\Plugins you may also need to copy a couple of the referenced dlls to the same folder.

Creating a build using the Tfs API

Here is a snippet of code to create tfs builds using the API with a few sensible default settings.