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Customizing Work Items in TFS 2010

The Team Foundation Server Power Tools allow you to edit templates online or offline. In the online mode, changes you make are instantly visible when you save the changes so be careful. I would advise creating a dummy Team Project to do the customizations on first before rolling the changes out to actual Team Projects. The offline mode works by saving the work item definitions locally as XML and making changes to the XML file. You will need to import the XML to the Team Project to deploy the changes.

So let’s take a look at adding a the following fields to Product Backlog Item WIT of the Scrum 1.0 template:

  • Deployed in Version
  • Actual Hours
  • Estimated Hours

Note: I know Actual/Estimates aren’t part of Scrum, but the higher-ups like to track it. It’s “Scrum-But” :)

1. Tools | Process Editor | Work Item Types | Open WIT From Server

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Customizing Process Templates and Work Items in Visual Studio 2010

One of the best features of Team Foundation Server 2010 is the ability to customize and create your own Process Templates, Work Items and Fields. The first thing you’ll need is to install the Team Foundation Server Power Tools. This will give you a menu under Tools | Process Editor to customize the templates

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From here you can start modifying the Work Item Types (WIT) in existing Team Projects or create new WITs.

The most frequent requests I get from TFS users is to:

  • Add additional fields to a work item like “Deployed in Version”, “Actual Hours”, “Estimated Hours” or “Client”
  • Add additional steps in the workflow to capture progression through the life cycle e.g. In Testing, In UAT
  • Add new reports e.g. SLA metrics, Changelogs

I will cover doing each in a series of posts.

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RE: Microsoft ASP.NET - Too many options

Repsonding to Peter Gfader’s blog post about Microsoft ASP.NET - Too many options

I see WebMatrix as an entry level tool to get people who don’t necessary have a development background a quick way to build and customize websites (using the templates and editors) on the Microsoft platform. It lowers the barriers to entry because you have one lightweight tool (7MB + about 20 MB of dependencies) that can edit web pages and manage your SQL. If the user wants to do more than they will need to step up to the visual studio offerings like if they wanted debugging support. I think of it as a step up from Notepad :)

Not sure whether the express editions of Visual Studio were downloaded and used much as the site is a bit confusing with sightly too many product skus, and maybe this is why they made Web Matrix – to drive adoption of Microsoft Web technology for users who don’t want to pay.

Too many “Express” offerings http://www.microsoft.com/express/Downloads/

  • Visual Basic 2010 Express
  • Visual C# 2010 Express
  • Visual C++ 2010 Express
  • Visual Web Developer 2010 Express
  • All - Offline Install ISO image file
  • Windows Phone Developer Tools
  • Microsoft Captions Language Interface Pack

Peter is right in that Microsoft tends to suffer from too many offerings (e.g. LINQ 2 SQL & EF, Microsoft Dynamics CRM/Great Plains/Axapta/Navision/SL) and a consolidation of the tools would make sense.

Too much choice is actually bad and can be mentally exhausting 

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VSTO Addins break after Visual Studio 2010 SP1 install, can't find config file

I ran into a breaking change with Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and VSTO at a client today. It seems there was a change that caused Office addins to look for their config files in the application’s folder instead of from the addin’s folder (e.g. Word.exe.config or Excel.exe.config). The result is all sorts of chaos with AppSettings, WCF service bindings and anything else that needs to be read from the app.config

The details are posted here on connect - Visual Studio SP1 (or specifically VSTO sp1) Issue with config file location

The bug was caused by a change in the way VSTO 4.0 SP1 reads the Manifest value in the Windows Registry. Previously “[TARGETDIR]MyWordAddIn.vsto|vstolocal“ was valid but the URI has changed in SP1

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The case of the Missing Team Project in VS 2010

Ran into a strange issue today when trying to upgrade a project from VS2008 to VS2010. We are running TFS 2010 and the Team Project appears fine in Team Explorer under VS2008 but is mysteriously missing from Team Explorer in VS2010. My windows account is also part of the Project Collection Administrators group.

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