Registration Service
The Registration Service enables disparate Team Foundation services to interoperate. It provides a central database of service metadata. By using this registration database, services on a Team Foundation Server can discover each other, and determine how to communicate.
Team Foundation supports loose coupling so that the tools can communicate with minimum assumptions on their behavior. This is especially important because a Team Foundation domain can contain different types of tools that will be available only in the future and tools from a third-party company which do not yet exist. The tools can be written in managed or unmanaged code. They can be written in any programming language. They can support SOAP or not. They might not even support an HTTP interface. The only common denominator that is assumed about a tool is that it supports network calls and can be located on the network through an identifying string.
Team Foundation Domains
Team System brings together many applications, such as version control and team build, and also other partner applications. These applications are referred to as tools. A group of tool servers, together with a unique Team Foundation Server, make up a Team Foundation domain. The tools in a domain can discover each other. They can use each other’s services by using the Team Foundation Registration Service. The registration service enables Team Foundation tools to share data about each other. By using this shared data, a tool can discover and use the services of other tools.
The Registration Service has both client and server components. Tools can also have both client (such as Visual Studio) and server components, or they might have only a server or client component.
Each tool in a Team Foundation domain must have a unique name, and is referred to as a unique tool type. For example, the tool name "Team Build" refers to "the Team Foundation Build installation in the Team Foundation domain". Multiple instances of the same tool will not be supported in V1.