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TFS Workbench and MS Project

December 5, 2010

If you are practicing Scrum and use TFS for this you probably know there are several project templates exist for TFS and Scrum. There is a couple from MS and there is also quite popular 3-rd party template from http://scrumforteamsystem.com/ guys. Here is a comparison of these template (it is from a company that created one of the templates, so it may be biased).

We've used "MSF Agile v5" for some time and now trying "Scrum for Team System v3.0". This template comes with a tool called "TFS workbench" (ex "Scrum Masters Workbench"). Some may find this tool handy, but if you expect high level of quality as in MS products you will be disappointed. It is free product (at least yet). Anyway this topic not about this tool, although I use it in the post title as the name of template is too generic.

If you are using SfTS 3.0 you may find that tasks hierarchy is lost when you export your WIs to MS Project. To fix this you need to do the following:

1) CD to "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\" 

2) Run "TFSFieldMapping download /collection:"http://YOURTFSSERVER:8080/tfs/YOURCOLLECTION" /teamproject:YOURPROJECT  /mappingfile:"c:/temp/MappingFile.xml""

3) Open c:/temp/MappingFile.xml and add the following line:

<HierarchyLinkType LinkType="Scrum.ImplementedBy" />

4) Run "TFSFieldMapping upload /collection:"http://YOURTFSSERVER:8080/tfs/YOURCOLLECTION" /teamproject:YOURPROJECT   /mappingfile:"c:/temp/MappingFile.xml""


Better Diff/Merge tool for TFS

December 20, 2007

Not all of us who are working with team Foundation server know that it is possible to replace default diff/merge tool with a custom one. Default one is far from perfect, it seems that Microsoft did not pay enough attention to it and just left the possibility for customization. You may want to replace it with some of the better alternatives available; there are both free and commercial ones:

This can be done in both VS2005 and VS2008. I feel you are curious now to how you can set you lovely diff/merge tool to be used by TFS. Here are screenshots guiding you to the right place buried inside VS UI.

Visual Studio Options Visual Studio Configure User Tools Screen Visual Studio Configure User Tool

TFS to TFS Migration tool

November 18, 2007

If you have two instances of Team Foundation Server and want to move projects between them, now you can do that with new tool from Microsoft.

Some more details from Brian Harry on this subject

Straight link to download page