Team Foundation Power Toys saved my life!

…or at least, my Sanity!!

Anyone following my series about our efforts to build a custom process in TFS for our internal teams will know that I’ve begun by tackling the Work Item Type definitions first.

Without a decent GUI for doing this, it’s all XML, angle brackets, attributes and all…so, with 90+ fields, 13 states and 25+ transitions, theres a lot of cutting and pasting involved, to say nothing of the difficulties involved in managing a 1200 line long XML file in a glorified text editor.

However, for those like myself who are neck deep in the vagaries of the Work Item Type definition schema, help is at hand, for lo, Microsoft have released version 1.2 of the Team Foundation Power Toys. Big deal? Sure is, cos new in this release is a GUI ProcessTemplate editor. Having had a quick play so far with the Work Item editors, it looks to be something of a saviour for me at least. Gone is the endless cut-and-paste routine, replaced with a nice (? better than xml at least…) gui editor.

No more continual making a change, importing to a team project, and checking form layout, as it also includes a form “preview” in the editor.

And it’s even got a (DSL?) designer for defining workflow!!

Nice one! On a final note though, I had a bit of a laugh at the “Microsoft Pre-release Software License Terms” that governs this editor….it states “This software is a pre-release version. It may not work the way a final version of the software will. We may change it for the final, commercial version. We also may not release a commercial version.” and also “The term of this agreement is until 31 December 2008, or commercial release of the software, whichever is first.”….so, it might be released commercially, it might not…and if it is, it might be available before the end of 2008, or it might not. Oh, and if it’s not, then your license will expire anyway.

Last time I read a license agreement! J

TFS Work Item Customisation, and the TF26201 error

With the work I’ve been doing defining custom Work Item Types in TFS lately, I came across an interesting problem, to do with TFS’ TF26201 error, so I thought I’d mention it here, along with how I went about sorting it out.

So, having finished the first cut of the first work item type definition, I went to test it, and discovered that some when changing a test work item to certain states and attempting to save, Team Explorer would fail to save in the new state, with an error:

“TF26201: This work item has unsupported fields, or user does not have permissions”.

I googled the error (as you do) and didn’t have much joy. A couple of people found this problem when doing stuff with the W.I.T object model, but I couldn’t find anything about tracking down whats wrong when testing custom work items using Team Explorer. So, to figure out what was causing the problem, heres what I did:

 

1. Edit the work item type definition file, commenting out all field rules in the “To” state, and upload back to server
2. Try saving item to the new state, which should work now, as there are now no field restrictions in place for that state
3. Uncomment all the field rules from the “To” state again, and again upload to server
4. Open work item and try to save as-is, without changes
5. Team Explorer will complain about specific fields, instead of the general error message
    

For the record, the reason I was receiving this error was because I had some fields in a couple of states with “<EMPTY />” rules, scoped to the STATE. Removing these fixed the issue, and I’m going to try scoping these to the a specific TRANSITION instead.

TFS Process Customisation Part 1: Work Item Types

So, as mentioned in my last post, I’ve been working on a project to create a Process Template that covers one of our internal software lifecycle processes.

The first part of this project that I’ve been working on is customising Work Item Types. We’ve got a few to do, and it’s not so much a “customisation” process as a “create from scratch” process, because the work items we’re creating really bear no resemblance to the out-of-the-box ones. To start with, I’ve got over 90 fields to define, up to 13 states and something like 25 transitions to define per work item type…I’ve been wondering why I let myself in for this recently!! J

Still, most of the work item types I need are just variations on a theme, so once I’ve got the first one done, the rest will be mostly cut-and-paste jobs…

Custom Processes with TFS

So at work we’re embarking on a project to implement one of our internal software development processes in Team Foundation Server/VSTS.

There seems to be a ton of documentation on how to do everything we need to do for this, but at the end of the day there are bound to be a few gotchas that crop up along the way…so, I’m thinking I’ll keep my blog updated with progress, and describe any nasties we come across as we go. I’m also thinking of putting together a series of tutorials in the style of the “hands on labs” you get at Tech-Ed and the like, related to this. If I do this, then I’ll make sure I post them here too…

So far, we’re looking at the following types of customisation:

Custom Work Item Types
Process Guidance
Default work items for new team projects
Default check-in policies for new team projects
A new check-in policy
A couple of new reports
A custom Team Build step to label source control for each build

Plus we’re also going to build some integration components to manage synchronising updates to work items in TFS with our corporate standard change management tool, Borland StarTeam, and vice versa. We’re also going to look at doing similar things for TFS and MSPS (MS Project Server)