I have always been annoyed with the mechanics of the Team Foundation Server check-in policies. I understand the limitations, but having to have a specific policy installed on every developers computer before you can use it is slightly ridicules and practically unmanageable. Why is there not a way to have a single installation that allows you to select any policy you want and have it execute in the desired manor on every client, including web clients?
I think it is. With the advent of the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) it should be possible to have a single (well one for each version of Visual Studio) policy that allows you to pick a DLR policy and have it run. One better would be to have a site that encapsulated those policies and you could just pick the one you want from a list. This could then open up a bunch of other features, like saved policy sets or composite policies for specific methodologies, or many others. But keeping to the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principal all I need are two or three things, a Web Service based data store, a Policy and an editor.
I am currently working on the Web Services and how to pass and store the data I will need, but it looks promising and my initial investigations certainly worked quite well even though I am hampered by my lack of IronPython or IronRuby experience.
Once I have the web services up to scratch (WCF by the way) I will try my hand at the Editor (WPF) and then move onto the Web interface (ASP.NET MVC) all in Visual Studio 2010. A mammoth task, but one I think I can manage… famous last words…
I might need to learn a little Ruby 🙂
