I have to update the work-items of my team very often. But since my office is in a different country from the other team members, the browsing process is very inconvenient: every time I click a work-item, my Visual Studio (VS) tries to connect to the TFS server, costing me 1-2 seconds! I want VS to stop this behavior so that no connection is called while I am browsing the work-tem list.
My question is: Can I do this? And how to do it if I can?
One option is to open the work item query in Microsoft Excel - then you can view and update the work items without being connected to the server.
After a long time, today I found the solution for this: use the MS VS 2010 Team Web Access to open your queries using a web browser!
Advantage when doing this:
No delay when clicking an item
Utilize all browser feature like searching, bookmark, ... to work with the queries
Enjoy!
Related
I need to clear some old entries saved for Connection target dropdown list in Attach to Process dialog.
Some remote servers have been decommissioned. But their names are still listed on the top of Connection target list.
When I start the Debug menu command "Attach to process", it takes awhile trying to connect to an old server that is not connectable.
Google search doesn't return the answer of where the list is saved.
Hopefully someone can provide the answer.
After quite some digging I've found the answer you might be after (if you still need it), the web page you'll need is at Microsoft Learn.
If you want to dive straight in have a look in the Tools Menu under Options and then find Cross Platform and Connection Manager:
I'm using Visual Studio 2022 17.4.3 (current version as of Jan 2023) just in case other versions have a different layout.
We recently upgraded our TFS 2010 to TFS 2013. I like most of the changes, but some of them not so much. Did Microsoft really took away the feature that was in TFS 2010 where one could attach to an work item by checking a checkbox next to the work item? The way I currently do in TFS 2013 is, before checking in I run my TFS query, remember the work item number, then do 'Add By Id' or something like that, type the ID and enter. It might not seem big deal to many, but I absolutely do not like this. Is there a way to get those checkboxes next to the work item back? If not, is there a better way to do that process?
It has changed a little but I guess the closest experience is to create a personal query or add a shared query to your favourites.
In the Pending Changes Window under Related Work Items click the Queries drop down and select the relevant query.
The results will open in the main window and you can drag and drop a work item into the Related Work Items section which will link it to your changeset.
If you have VS Premium or Ultimate then you can use the My Work window in Team Explorer which will list your assigned work items in the Available Work Items section and you can just drag them into In Progress Work.
I'm evaluating Team Foundation Server 2010 with Visual Studio 2010 Professional. VS Pro does not include Microsoft Test Manager, so Test Case and Shared Steps Work Items do not permit adding steps. Is there an effective way to use Test Cases with VS Pro? I've thought of the following methods:
Attach Excel files listing test steps and ignore the Steps tab.
Customize Steps tab to allow text entry (I think this is possible).
Remove Test Cases and Shared Steps Work Items.
Are other teams using TFS with VS Pro? What has worked for you?
You can remove the work item types from the project if you wish, but if you decide to purchase a few standalone Test Manager copies later on you'd just have to add them back in again.
My recommendation would be to just ignore them.
If you want to store your tests & steps in TFS work items, you could modify the existing test case work item, adding a new tab and text area for manually entered test steps but I'd avoid that if I could just to avoid messing with the default work item type.
A better choice would be to create a new work item type, add the text area for your steps and define the relationship between requirements and test work items as "tested by/verfies" much as the existing test work items do.
How do people generally deal with TFS when you've got to work with multiple solution files? If you've got one instance it's easy because you can always go to that window for the source control explorer, pending changes, check on builds or work items. But when you have 4-5 solutions, it becomes tricky to deal with. You might expand some folders or check some pending items on one VS instance but you have to remember which one you did it on.
Having a separate instance dedicated just to TFS tasks is tempting, but there's only one window state for the whole program. If that instance is closed last, all instances will come up with all the TFS windows open.
How do other people deal with this? Can you use separate profiles somehow and cordon off a "TFS" instance of Visual Studio?
Use the Pending Changes window. View -> Other Windows -> Pending Changes. This has a toolbar option to show only those changes pending for the current solution also. It's the last toolbar button in the Pending Changes window. I usually make this a full document in VS and then memorize the keyboard shortcut to it: ALT+V, E, H. Obviously you could bind your own shortcut, but what fun is that.
Eclipse has a similar perspective/view to Pending Changes, but it's name escapes me and I don't have my Ubuntu VM up at the moment.
Solution Explorer and Source Control Explorer are definitely not my recommendation for check-in activities. I personally like to clear out all of the checkboxes on Pending Changes and then Diff each file. This keeps me from A) waiting too long before a checkin (it sucks to compare 20 files 1 by 1) and B) avoids checking in a change I didn't intend.
If you have multiple instances of Visual Studio open at one time (which I'm not quite sure why you would need to do this), your changes are "synchronized" across all instances of Visual Studio. Don't do your check-in from the solution explorer, do it from the Source Control explorer, then you're sure to get all your updates in a single check-in.
You might find VSCommands useful when working with VS/TFS - it can be configured to display the Solution and TFS Branch name in the title bar, this indication is invaluable when working with multiple instances of VS (or multiple branches of the same project).
Is there any way to associate a web page with a project in Visual Studio, and have it load up in the IDE? For example, I have a project who's task list is maintained on a web site. It would be ideal to see those tasks within the IDE instead of a separate page. I can accomplish that now by following these steps:
Press Ctrl-Alt-R to open a Web Browser page
Change the URL to my desired path
Position the page as desired (like in its own tab group, off to the right of my code)
It would be nice to have a link somewhere in my project that I could click and open this page in the IDE without changing the URL every time. I have several different projects that would benefit from this. Any ideas?
Something like this happens with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. The various documents and guidance associated with your current Team Project area accessible from within Visual Studio, in the Team Explorer window.
You can also create a Guidance Package to apply various commands and pieces of documentation at appropriate places within your projects. see Guidance Automation Extensions and Guidance Automation Toolkit.
Nice idea. The only thing that I can think of is via Visual Studio Extensibility. Basically,
Define an MSBuild property in the project file or a custom field in the solution file that has the project url.
Write a VS package that subscribes to the solution load event or something similar (I am not familiar with VS object model but I am sure there is an event like that) and looks for that custom field and extracts the url if it exists in the solution or the project file and then opens a web browser within VS that points to that url.
Here's my quick hack around this problem:
Create a text file in the project. I called my "notes.txt", and I use it to store notes, ideas, etc. that don't have a home elsewhere in the project.
Add the web link to the top of the file.
Open the text file in the IDE and put it in a new tab group. I put mine in a vertical tab group off to the right.
Drag the separator as far over as it will go to "hide" the tab group. This way it's always open and available but not taking up much space.
When you want the web page, "show" the tab group (i.e. drag the separator back) and ctrl-click the link.
This has the added benefit of opening the web page in the same tab group as the text file, so you can push them both aside when not using them.
I'm sure there's more that could be done by writing packages as others have suggested, but this was a low-effort way to get me close enough to what I wanted. I'd love to hear other suggestions or modifications that might make this setup better.