You may (or may not) have seen a CodeSwarm video.   If not, here is a link.

I like the idea of these videos (although I’m not exactly sure why). I thought it would be interesting to see a video for the source code at my place of work.   We use TFS, and from what I could find, there was no existing code to hook TFS to CodeSwarm.   As such, I spent a few hours working around the TFS SDK to see if I could solve it.  My code and notes are here – hope it is useful.  If you do like it/use it/modify it/improve it, please let me know.

[Note: I only started using the TFS SDK this evening, so I may have done it the wrong way. Also, but using the ChangeSet check-in time, it means a number of files are groupped with the same time - not ideal, but I suppose it is accurate.]

This requires a C# Console application – see the foot of this post for the code – to connect to your TFS server, and extract the data.  This will output an XML file containing the changes.  This can then be used with CodeSwarm to generate the video.

You’ll need to download and install the relevant pieces for CodeSwarm (available here).

Steps:

• Use the output from the C# application to generate a file called “TFSExport.xml”.
• Copy ”TFSExport.xml” to your “$/CodeSwarm/data” directory.
• Update ”$/CodeSwarm/data/Sample.config” file to reference “TFSExport.xml”
• Run the CodeSwarm toolkit (“run.bat”).
• Voila!

The default CodeSwarm config needs some tweaks to get a good video.  If you have any suggestions, please send them to me.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Common;

namespace TFSToCodeSwarm
{
  class Program
  {
    public static void GetChanges( string _tfsServer, string _tfsRepository, string _versionFromString )
    {
      //connection to TFS Version Control
      TeamFoundationServer tfs = TeamFoundationServerFactory.GetServer( _tfsServer );
      VersionControlServer vcs = (VersionControlServer)tfs.GetService( typeof( VersionControlServer ) );

      // Null means *all*
      VersionSpec versionSpecFrom = null;
      if ( null != _versionFromString && "" != _versionFromString )
      {
        versionSpecFrom = VersionSpec.ParseSingleSpec( _versionFromString, null );
      }

      System.Collections.IEnumerable enumerable = vcs.QueryHistory( _tfsRepository,
            VersionSpec.Latest,
            0,
            RecursionType.Full,
            "",
            versionSpecFrom,
            VersionSpec.Latest,
            Int32.MaxValue,
            true,
            true );

      Console.WriteLine( "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\" standalone=\"no\" ?>" );
      Console.WriteLine( "<File_Events>" );

      foreach ( Changeset changeset in enumerable )
      {
        foreach( Change change in changeset.Changes )
        {
          long numSeconds = (long)(change.Item.CheckinDate - new DateTime(1970, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0 )).TotalSeconds;
          String strItemName = change.Item.ServerItem.Replace( '&', ' ' );

          String strDetails = String.Format( "<event author=\"{0}\" date=\"{1}\" filename=\"{2}\" />",
              changeset.Owner, numSeconds,  strItemName );
          Console.WriteLine( strDetails );
        }
      }
      Console.WriteLine( "</File_Events>" );
    }

    static void Main( string[] args )
    {
      if ( 3 == args.Length )
      {
        GetChanges( args[0], args[1], args[2] );
      }
      else
      {
        Console.WriteLine( "\nUsage: TFSToCodeSwarm <SERVERURL> <REPOSITORY> <STARTDATE>\n" );
        Console.WriteLine( "\nExample: TFSToCodeSwarm \"http://tfs\" \"$/SourceCode\" \"D03/02/2009\"\n" );
      }
    }
  }
}