Displaying TFS Data Within a Wiki

Description:

Software development teams that are using wikis to augment their project management needs want to view their related wiki documents from within TFS, as discussed in the Displaying Wiki Documents in TFS project.

There is a symmetrical need for information to flow in the opposite direction ... that is, for TFS work items and other information to be able to be displayed within the team's wiki. This allows the team to manage their TFS information in much more dynamic ways than is provided by the major TFS interfaces provided by Microsoft, namely the Team Explorer desktop client (a Visual Studio add-in), Team System Web Access, Work Item Web Access, and the SharePoint project portals created for each TFS project.

All of the above interfaces are static interfaces that can only be used as-is. There is no way to rearrange the menus and screens of these interfaces and annotate the TFS documents with free-form text. This dynamic rearrangement and organization of information is what wikis are good at. By allowing the team's wiki to grab information from TFS and display and organize it in creative and useful ways, the team has a better ability to organize their information in ways that make sense for the project.

Solution:

The client was using the .NET-based ScrewTurn Wiki. We wrote an IFormatterProvider plug-in to the ScrewTurn wiki that allowed TFS information to be displayed and formatted within ScrewTurn pages, using standard wiki markup syntax.

We are currently investigating other wiki platforms for integration possibilities. If you need an integration with your chosen wiki, please contact us to discuss the project in more detail.