TFS2012–multiple users assignment – tfs user group

I think the most well known classical workaround like in TFS2008 and TFS 2010 is to assign a work item to a group of people.

How to do it?

• You have to create for each combination of persons you want to be able to assign a user group in TFS
• You have to adapt each work item which should support this by adding these groups to the assigned to field as allowed values.

Assume that you are working in a team with 5 persons and want to be able to assign your work items to the following combinations.

• Group: Team
• Group: PersonAPersonB (Person A, Person B)
• Group: PersonAPersonC (Person A, Person C)
• and so on ….

You have to create for each combination a new group in TFS and assign the persons to it.

You have to adapt your work items and change the definition of your Assigned To field to something like this:

<FIELD name="Assigned To" refname="System.AssignedTo" type="String" syncnamechanges="true" reportable="dimension">
  <ALLOWEDVALUES expanditems="true">
    <LISTITEM value="[project]\PersonAPersonB" />
    <LISTITEM value="[project]\Team" />
    <LISTITEM value="[project]\PersonAPersonC" />
  </ALLOWEDVALUES>
</FIELD>

And in webaccess it will look like this (test is the only user in this screenshot and is assigned to the team group):

 

Limitations?

One of the most interesting question is how it will integrate with the new agile features in TFS2012.

General issues and workarounds:

• Custom work item queries have to be adapted to also work with groups
  
• Hardcoded work item queries are not working with groups like “My Work in Team Explorer“

Taskboard

For the taskboard it doesn’t make a difference if a work item is assigned to a user or a tfs user group.

Capacity planning Calculation is broken!

As we can see in the screenshot below the capacity planning calculation does not work together with the group assignments.

 

Conclusion

For special use cases this can be a valid approach with the downside that you cannot use the new capacity planning features. Each work item query which relies on the @me keyword has to be adapted for each team member to include the custom groups. This means that we won’t be able to have a generic query like “Assigned to me” anymore.

TFS2012–assign work items to multiple users–overview

Since the beginning, Team Foundation Server does not support multiple user assignments for work items at all.

Before continuing reading you should ask yourself the following questions about why you or your team want to be able to assign a bunch of work, tracked as a work item to multiple users:

• What do you want to achieve?
• What does the team want to achieve?
• Who will be the owner/responsible of the workitem if it is not done?
• Is to much work for one person? –> Split the work to multiple tasks!
• Do you want to pair with another person on the task?
• ….

Depending on the answers there are are multiple options/workarounds for different scenarios available like the following

• Assign a work item to a tfs user group
• Add additional fields on your work items (eg: AssignedTo2)
• Change the behavior of the assigned to field from ‘allowed values’ to ‘suggested values’

In the following posts I will show different solutions how this can be achieved, limitations and to witch scenario the different solutions will fit.

If you think TFS should support this feature natively please vote on uservoice here

VS2012 – tips and tricks – team explorer shortcuts and patterns

In my last post I wrote about team explorer shortcuts and patterns for Visual Studio 2010.

Visual Studio 2012 has already been launched with the new Team Explorer. Like the new Solution Explorer, the new Team Explorer follows the concept of a single tool-window with multiple scopes depending on the content.

Unlike the solution explorer which supports multiple instances for different scopes the new Team Explorer doesn’t support this which requires multiple clicks to navigate between the different scopes and sometimes you’re felling like lost in the toolbox.

For quick navigation shortcuts are your friend …

If you are a ReSharper user the following shortcuts are compatible with IDEA scheme.

Pattern for Team Explorer: SHIFT + ALT + T

VS2012 Team Explorer commands	shortcuts
Team.TeamExplorerSearch	STRG + ä
TeamFoundationContextMenus.Commands.GoToHome	SHIFT + ALT + T, H
TeamFoundationContextMenus.Commands.GoToBuilds	SHIFT + ALT + T, B
TeamFoundationContextMenus.Commands.GoToWorkItems	SHIFT + ALT + T, W
TeamFoundationContextMenus.Commands.GoToPendingChanges	SHIFT + ALT + T, P
TeamFoundationContextMenus.Commands.GoToMyWork	SHIFT + ALT + T, M
TeamFoundationContextMenus.Commands.GoToWebAccess	SHIFT + ALT + T, A

Pattern for Editor/SourceControl: SHIFT + ALT + S

VS2012 TFS Editor/SourceControl commands	shortcuts
File.TfsHistory	SHIFT + ALT + S, H
File.TfsAnnotate	SHIFT + ALT + S, A
File.TfsCompare	SHIFT + ALT + S, C
File.TfsUndoCheckout	SHIFT + ALT + S, U

VS2010 – tips and tricks – team explorer shortcuts and patterns

In my last post I wrote about how to do a quick comparison using shortcuts and avoiding the mouse.

If you are working with TFS maybe this shortcuts are interesting for you.

Navigate to TFS related tool windows

If you want to navigate to TFS related tool windows like Team Explorer Window or Pending Changes Window you may have noticed that for some of them some keyboard shortcuts are predefined.

The default keyboard binding for Team Explorer is something like CTRL+W, M which is not really related to the name.

I’m a fan of keyboard shortcuts and it’s hard to remember all of them every time. Because of that, I tried to define some smarter keyboard shortcut pattern.

Most of the CTRL+W + character shortcuts are already mapped to other windows. I’m using as an alternative ALT+W for all TFS Team Explorer related windows.

You can see a list below:

VS2010 commands	Shortcut
View.TfsPendingChanges	ALT + W, P
View.TfsSourceControlExplorer	ALT + W, S
View.TeamExplorer	ALT + W, T

VS2010 – tips and tricks - quicker file comparison in pending changes window

Sometimes I need to compare some local pending change of a file to the latest TFS version.

This can be done like in the screenshot below,

• grabbing the mouse,
• right click on the file
• select Compare –> With Latest Version

This is nice if you are a fan of mouse driven development. I’m more the fan of shortcuts so an alternate solution is the following:

• navigate to the pending changes window
• press SHIFT + Double-Left-Mouse-Click on the file or
• SHIFT + Enter for the selected File

then a background comparison is started.

One easy way to navigate to the pending changes window is pressing CTRL + TAB and navigate with the keyboard arrows to the pending changes window.

Another solution would be to configure some shortcut for the pending changes tool window.

Faster XAML editing in VS2010

If you are working with the XAML Editor in VS2010 you’ve maybe realized that it’s much better than with VS2008.

You can even be faster if you change the editor from default XAML Editor to “Source Code (Text) Editor”.

You not only have VS IntelliSense, XML collapsing and the XAML context menu support, also you have full ReSharper support!

How to change the default editor:

1. Right-click on a XAML file in the Solution Explorer
2. Select "Open With..."
3. Select "Source Code (Text) Editor"
4. Click on "Set as Default"
5. Click OK
6. You're done!

With SHIFT + F7 you can change from “Source Code (Text) Editor” to the default XAML editor with its split view, navigator, etc.

Source: http://weblogs.asp.net/fmarguerie/archive/2009/01/29/life-changer-xaml-tip-for-visual-studio.aspx

TFS2010–Single Server Installation COM Error

After installing a new TFS2010 single server instance I had the following error in my event log:

The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1}
and APPID
{61738644-F196-11D0-9953-00C04FD919C1}
to the user VB-TFS2010\WSSSERVICE SID (S-1-5-21-1484069085-12520411-2351891930-1013) from address LocalHost (Using LRPC). This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

The problem was that SharePoint Administration Service was running under Local System Account. I realized I forgot to set the appropriate service account.

How to find out that the problem was coming from SharePoint?
Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/mhamilton/archive/2006/12/19/101568.aspx