MS Project TFS binding improves tracking.

Just a few days ago, I setup a binding between TFS work items and MS Project Plan. It required me to use the TFSFieldMapping utility and modify some mappings based on the custom work item definitions we have in TFS. I am now able to better track work items assigned to my team. I would really recommend this for a project using TFS & MPP.

Better Together Microsoft Project Plan + TFS.

Today, I learnt how to synchronize my MPP with TFS work items. I must confess that it is a delightful feature for any project manager!

You can access this productive feature from the Team menu of a MPP. Select Get Work Items and have your mpp populated with work items created in TFS. If you are not too happy with the field mappings, Microsoft provides a nice command line utility named TFSFieldMapping which resides in "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE". Follow the steps given here and here to customize the mappings for your project.

Simple :)

Updating TFS Warehouse manually.

To update TFSWarehouse manually, you must access the machine hosting TFS and browse to
http://localhost:8080/Warehouse/v1.0/warehousecontroller.asmx

Then invoke the Run operation. This operation executes asynchronously. To see if the warehouse update is complete, invoke the operation GetWarehouseStatus. Simple!

Frequently used TFS commands

Some of the TFS commands I use frequently include
1. tfsdeleteproject
2. witimport
3. witexport
4. tf workspace
5. tf status: To check who has checked out a file Default.aspx, run the command
tf status Default.aspx /user:*

Controlling form layout for TFS Work Items

Here is a very good post on the following undocumented attributes in TFS for controlling work item form layouts
1. Name
2. MinimumSize
3. NumberFormat
4. MaxLength
5. Format

TFS Backup: Remember the Agent

I scheduled a maintenance job to backup the TFS databases following the steps published on msdn. When I executed the plan, I noticed the following error in the SQL Server logs.

BackupDiskFile::CreateMedia: Backup device 'D:\Backups\WSS_Content_backup_200801111921.bak' failed to create. Operating system error 5(Access is denied.)

After some investigation, I noticed that the account under which SQL Server Agent was running did not have write permissions on the backup folder. After granting the appropriate permissions and re-executing the plan, backups got created and I heaved a sigh of relief!