June 2007 - Posts
are available on the ASP.NET site:
What do both topics have in common? Well, Microsoft started to publish How-Do-I-videos for various technologies and these two were the same topics covered on Visual Studio Team System.
- How Do I: Customize TeamPlain?
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In this video, Scott Golightly shows you how you can customize TeamPlain Web Access to work the way that you do. You will see how to create and assign work items, create your own queries, and how to create and customize favorites to make navigation in the product easier.
- How Do I: Create Custom Work Items in Team Foundation Server?
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In this video, Scott Golightly shows us how to use the Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server Power Tools to create custom work items. He shows how to add additional fields to the bug work item type and how to display the new fields in the bug entry form.
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You can also subscribe to the Team System video category by adding this feed to your favorite RSS feed reader.
When working with Work Items often the questions comes up how to efficiently communicate between team members within TFS (not using e-mails) or what the difference between the Description field and the Comments field on the History tab is.
Description field
We use the description field for describing what the actual work item is all about. This information is usually filled out by the creator and only changed if something was wrong or could have been written clearer.
Comments on History field
The History field is an audit trail on the one hand - showing who changed what and when on an item as well as a discussion board where you can write a short comment to every work item change you do to this item. You can put your questions or remarks into the comments section and after hitting the save they will "walk down" to the audit trail at the bottom. This is how we solve communication between parties in TFS – without jumping out to e-mails.
(Note: I did the yellow highlighting. The original is plain black and white.)
You want to create a new performance session, therefor click on the corresponding menu item and NOTHING HAPPENS?
This behavior happens when the Performance Add-In got disabled somehow. To re-enable it try running:
devenv /ResetSkipPkgs
If this doesn’t solve your problem Dave Lubash from the Visual Studio team recommends in his post on the MSDN forums to
repeat it after doing: devenv /ResetAddin and devenv /ResetSettings.
Good luck!
Problem: If you remove a user from Active Directory or the local machine (depending where you store your user accounts for TFS), all work items that were assigned to that user cannot be modified anymore, at least if you use the default MSF process templates.
The following validation error appears that requires the value in the “Assigned To” field to be a valid user:
Workaround 1 (easiest): Just reassign the bug to yourself or someone else. Caveat: You probably don’t want to do that because the information is then not correct anymore since it was not you working on the work item.
Workaround 2 (recommended): You can modify the Work Item Type definitions so that the “Assigned to” field does not re-validate values that have been successfully validated in the past. In this case there would be not error, however if you put in a new name into the “Assigned to” field it would be validated.
- Export the WIT (Work Item Type) of which you want to change the behavior as described using the Microsoft Process Editor.
- Add the ALLOWEXISTINGVALUE rule to the field definition of the “Assigned to” field.
- Save and import the WIT into your team projects and you’re ready to go.
Note: Be aware that you need to change all Work Item Types and for all team project separately where you want the new behavior to be used.
-Neno