The ODP Service released by Microsoft allows you to connect to local TFS installations or to the Codeplex TFS system. Typically you start with a private instance, trying to get a feeling for the service and to have full control.

If you download the service, you get a quite good instruction telling you, what you have to do to get the service running. Just check out chapter “Running the Service outside the Windows Azure Compute Emulator (using IIS 7)” of file “StartHere.htm” in the installation folder.

Here’s a quick reference on what you have to do:

1. Run the installer.
2. Start Visual Studio 2010 as an adminitrator and open the OdataTFS.sln in the installation directory of your OData Service.
3. Open the properties of the ODataTFS.Web project.
4. Choose “Use Local IIS” and click “Create Virtual Directory” – just as described in the “StartHere.htm” . Keep in mind WHERE you created this directory and what name you chose. For this guidance I consider you stick to the defaults.
5. Now modify the file Web.config of ODataTFS.Web to use your TFS by modifing the following entry:

<add key=”ODataTFS.TfsServer” value=”https://tfs.codeplex.com/tfs” />

6. Modify it to use your TFS url. Typicall it follows the pattern

http://<tfsservername>:<port>/<tfs>/.

Make sure you use http or https, depending on your installation.  If you don’t know the URL use Team Explorer and check the URL in the properties window:

Modify the entry accordingly. In my example this would be:

<add key=”ODataTFS.TfsServer” value=http://dmeixner3:8080/tfs/ />

7. Now build the solution. Following this guidance, the newly created IIS site uses your output folder to work with. So the service will work immediately.

8. Open a browser and browse to

http://<tfsservername>:<port>/ODataTFS.Web/<CollectionName>/

If you have modified the ports or are using https (which is a very good idea !) modify the url accordingly.

If you followed the steps in the guidance, you need the ODataTFS.Web part, because the virtual directory created in step 4 has this name.

In my case

http://dmeixner3/ODataTFS.Web/DefaultCollection

works. The result looks like this:

 

9. Maybe you have to log in and provide credentials. Use the credentials you use for the instance of TFS when you connect using e.g. Team Explorer.

10. Now view the changesets using an URL like this:

http://dmeixner3/ODataTFS.Web/DefaultCollection/Changesets

It works. Great! Now you can start implementing clients which access data of TFS using ODP – just as my colleague Karsten Kempe did for Windows Phone 7 when he wrote the app Tfs To Go. Please keep in mind, that for productive environments you should definitly use https instead of http, which will require some additional steps when it comes to configuring IIS!