Automatically configure Team Explorer connections

The first time you open Team Explorer to connect to Team Foundation Server there are three things that needs to be done before you can start working against the server.

1. Register server in Visual Studio
2. Select active projects in Team Explorer
3. Create workspace in Source Control

I got a request if there was a way to automate these steps. Of course it can be done, but there are some light hacking involved. Here is what I cam up with:

Register server
Registered servers are easy to manage since they are saved in the registry. Given that the user has write access to the registry this step is easy to automate. The structure is as shown below, where my server is called ServerName. The key names explain themselves and this is all that is needed for Visual Studio to find the server as a registered Team Foundation Server.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\TeamFoundation\Servers]
"ServerName"="http://servername:8080/" 

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\TeamFoundation\Servers\ServerName]
"Offline"=dword:00000000
"AutoReconnect"=dword:00000001

Select active projects
Active projects are saved in the Team Explorer configuration file. This is save to one of the following locations:

Windows 7
C:\Users\{user}\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Team Explorer\TeamExplorer.config

Windows XP
C:\Documents and Settings\{user}\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Team Explorer\TeamExplorer.config

The file only contains a list of the active projects with an URI reference. That makes it pretty straight forward to create or modify this file as you wish. This assumes that the user has write access to the specified directory.

<!--Configuration file: specifies which project are visible in the Team Explorer-->
<server_list>
    <server url="http://servername:8080/" current="yes" autoload="yes">
        <project uri="vstfs:///Classification/TeamProject/74ef7e04-e96a-4bc1-9f4f-307d92eb5666" />
        <project uri="vstfs:///Classification/TeamProject/eff01aeb-6d20-4523-a3e2-8709c88319fc" />
        <project uri="vstfs:///Classification/TeamProject/0f8f3f94-e63b-4401-aa5a-014b079e156d" />
    </server>
</server_list>

Create workspace
Creating a workspace is the only of the steps that is made by using the Team Foundation Server API. Here is a simple example of how it may look. VersionControl is a property of the type VersionControlServer that has already been initialized.

internal void CreateWorkSpace(string sourceControlPath, string localPath)
{
    if(!Directory.Exists(localPath))
    {
        Directory.CreateDirectory(localPath);
    }
    WorkingFolder[] workingFolders = new WorkingFolder[]
    {
        new WorkingFolder(sourceControlPath, localPath, WorkingFolderType.Map)
    };
    VersionControl.CreateWorkspace(WorkSpaceName, UserName, String.Empty, workingFolders, SystemInformation.ComputerName);
}

With these steps packed together in a neat little application run at logon the user never has to anything more than to start Visual Studio to get started working against the Team Foundation Server.