Robert McLaws: FunWithCoding.NET

Over the last few days, I've been trying to get my TFS system upgraded with some customizations that members of my team have requested. TFS is a very well-designed system, but unfortunately the out-of-the-box process of customizing your processes leaves a little to be desired.

It took me a couple hours of tinkering, but I figured out how to add some new statuses to the MSF for Agile templates, as well as new fields and UI for tracking the steps to reproduce a bug. I'll be posting those modifications in a bit, but in the meantime, I've assembled some of the resources that I found helpful on my Custom TFS templating journey. I hope they're useful.

• Bulk editing work items using TFS Power Tools "templates"
• One method of adding new statuses without breaking reports
• Dave McKinstry's Guide to TFS Process Customization

And some other cool TFS Stuff:

• Vista Sidebar Gadgets for TFS
• TeamDef - Time Management for TFS
• CoDE Magazine - Data Dude Meets Team Build
• Microsoft Office Requirements Authoring Starter Kit (using structured Word documents to populate a TFS database with requirements and work items)

I'm stepping up the use of TFS on my team for project management, so as I come across more resources that I find useful, I'll post them.