If you develop small utilities for Team Foundation Server a lot, you might want to save some time and use a project template (see bottom of post for download link) that already comes equipped with the correct references to the Team Foundation Object Model (Microsoft.TeamFoundation.*.dlls) as well as the most important using statements and a few lines of code to get started.
Installation
Copy the ZIP file to {MyDocuments}\Visual Studio 2010\Templates\ProjectTemplates.
Usage
Create a new project and select “TFS Utility” from the “Visual C#” list.
The template creates a new Windows Forms application with references to the Microsoft.TeamFoundation.*.dlls (btw: the C# compiler gets rid of all references that were not used in the project during compilation)…
… as well as a a few using statements and some code to start from.
Happy TFS tool development!
Download: TfsUtility.zip
This post is part of a blog series:
Steps:
- Download and install the freeware tool AIT WordToTFS from here (registration required).
- Start Microsoft Word (winword.exe). You should see a new "WordToTFS" ribbon.
- Choose the layout template you want to use (the names correspond to TFS process templates, but it's possible to furhter customize those layout templates).
- Once, you are ready to publish, click 'Connect' on the 'WordToTFS' ribbon and choose a team project to connect to.
- Start by creating an outline, headlines, introduction text as you would normally do when creating a requirements document in MS Word.
- Once you are ready to add a requirement, choose "Empty Product Backlog Item" (in the case of the "Visual Scrum Scrum" template; the name differs for other process template, e.g. "Requirement" in MSF/CMMI or "User Story" for MSF/Agile).
- This will insert a table with the typical fields to describe a requirement. Replace 'Title' and 'Description' with appropriate values (you can edit those defaults by clicking "Edit Default Values" on the ribbon).
- Repeat Steps 5 to 7 for additional requirements.
- Once you're happy with your requirement(s), click 'Publish' in the 'WordToTFS' ribbon.
- The work item is now created in TFS.
After publishing the requirement table looks smilar to this:
Notes:
- Keep in sync: After initially publishing your work items you can either change those in MS Word and re-publish those changes, or change the work items with a different TFS client and click 'Refresh' on the 'WordToTFS' ribbon to import those changes into your MS Word document.
- Images: You can insert images in the description field (if the process template is using an HTML-based field) and those will be updated as attachments:
- Test Cases with Test steps: You can enter a numbered list of steps for a Test Case, which will be translated to test steps (as they are required by Microsoft Test Manager):
Disclaimer: This MS Word integration is not part of Visual Studio or Team Foundation Server. The plug-in was developed by a Microsoft Partner (AIT) and not by Microsoft itself.
This post is part of a blog series:
Steps:
- Download and install the freeware tool AIT WordToTFS from here (registration required).
- Start Microsoft Word (winword.exe). You should see a new "WordToTFS" ribbon.
- Choose the layout template you want to use (the names correspond to TFS process templates, but it's possible to furhter customize those layout templates).
- Click 'Connect' on the 'WordToTFS' ribbon and choose a team project to connect to.
If the "missing mapping fields" dialog appears, you probably choose the wrong layout template (you can still change it before the next steps).
- Click 'Get Work Items" from the ribbon.
- On the 'Get Work Items' pane to the ride, select a stored query.
- Click on 'Find' button.
Optionally, deselect work items in the list if you want to exclude them.
- Click on 'Import' button.
- Enjoy!
Disclaimer: This MS Word integration is not part of Visual Studio or Team Foundation Server. The plug-in was developed by a Microsoft Partner (AIT) and not by Microsoft itself.
Issue:
TFS 2010 SP 1 fails with:
Product: Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 - ENU - Update 'KB2182621' could not be installed. Error code 1603.
Resolution:
In my case the log file indicated that permissions to the Master database were missing. I made sure the setup user got sysadmin priviledges for the time of the SP install and it went through very smoothly.
(An updated list for TFS 2012 is available here)
This is my personal selection of books covering TFS 2010:
Have fun reading!