Naren's Blog

What is custom control feature? Now you can show your own controls in work item form. See for http://blogs.msdn.com/narend/archive/2006/09/27/773025.aspx introduction to this feature. This is part of SP1 beta . There is also a codeplex project to...

Update on 7/29/2008: A much more powerful and integrated tool is released now as Power Tools. Check out screen shots, features and download: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2008/07/08/july-08-tfs-power-tool-preview.aspx When I was going over past...

I see various questions on configuration difficulties in using Workitem OM in web application. Unfortunately workitem object model is not yet optimized for web scenarios and it still uses a cache per user. So implementing security gets tricky. I wrote...

Overview : If you have used links in work item tracking, you might have wondered if you could add your own link type. In V1 we do have linking extensibility model and the purpose of post is to walkthrough how to use it. Example of custom link could...

Everything was working, I did some refactoring and starting getting this error: Error: Unhandled Error in Silverlight Application Code: 2103 Category: InitializeError Message: Invalid or malformed application: Check manifest In silverlight 3, it...

Summary : VSTS work item tracking UI elements such as work item form, query document and result list are exposed for access by Addins and VSIP packages. This post helps to get jump start on how to access those elements and use the events for custom...

This issue keeps coming up in forums and discussion lists. In V1, there isn't a way exposed to delete workitems. Richard Berg pointed out a workaround that I hadn't thought of before: Denying permission to everyone for those workitems will achieve same...

I was collecting links & pointers to answer common questions in forums related to TFS eventing and thought of posting them as FAQ. I hope to update this post as I find new interesting information for common questions. What is TFS evening and...

Beta for SP1 is released and it comes with many exciting features for TFS. One of features requests I hear much is Custom Controls feature and it is in this SP1 beta! Have you ever wanted to place your own controls in work item form to provide custom...

A while back I made a post on Hidden attributes to control your work item form layout . Later I realized from a forum post that there are few control specific attributes that are not documentated, so I updated the post with NumberFormat & MaxLength...

If you built a custom control in VS2005 (Whidbey) and deployed in user’s machines, what happens if the user upgrades to next version of TFS (Orcas or Rosario)? The Orcas client will try to load the custom control, but the custom control was compiled with...

I heard this question few times: “I see the action named Microsoft.VSTS.Actions.Checkin to resolve work items in my tools, what other actions are available and how to use this feature to define my own”. What is a “custom action” ? Suppose you are...

John wrote a RSS feed sample a while back and I am posting it for him here. This is simlar to version control feed Jeff posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/jefflu/archive/2005/09/23/473248.aspx . A code comment excerpt from WorkItemRssFeed.aspx: //...

After release of custom controls feature in SP1 beta, few asked me how to build dynamic custom controls: For example, state and city controls like below where city gets loaded based on state’s value. Another variation of it is one or more controls show...

I was playing with search macros in live.com and was amazed at what we can do with those. In past I could not search for keywords only in MSDN forums specific to VSTS. If I did a search in web, then my results had non-forum stuff as well, which was a...

Did you ever want to add two text fields on a tab vertically and wondered how to control their heights? Ever wanted to add same field twice in different places on a work item form? These are possible, but that configuration detail got missed in our documentation...

Team System Web Access 2008 powertool is released with TFS 2008 recently on Nov 19th (see here for WIT improvements in this release). So I expect more people will start looking into porting their custom controls over to Web Access or building new ones...

Few customers wanted to add a menu to context menu of workitems in result list. It seems like a great idea to show actions on selected work items, but we haven’t exposed the command ids for context menus in V1 and Orcas. We did expose the “Team” menu...

This is the news of the day and you might have seen it in other blogs & news posts. Brian's blog talks in detail with screenshots at http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/03/26/microsoft-acquires-teamplain.aspx . Effective today, TeamPlain is...

I see many sites that list various TFS tools available for download, and this is one another attempt to track that list. I'll keep adding & updating the list in this post as I come across sites, so that it'll help me when I am looking for a tool,...

I was looking for a quick sample on linking queries, but was surprised that I couldn't find one. There is "collectibles" sample in VSSDK that covers a lot on linking, but it is huge and I think a one pager sample would be helpful for most needs. So, I...

Many asked me how linking is exposed in our Rosario object model, how to construct, run and use the results of link queries. I decided to build a power point on explaining it and attached is that powerpoint file: http://blogs.msdn.com/narend/attachment...

Rosario is next release of TFS after upcoming Orcas release. You can read a lot about Rosario from Brian's blog . CTP is available to try these features. This post briefly lists UI featuers in links control. By default, the new links control now...

Two custom controls are posted now in WIT custom controls codeplex project: http://www.codeplex.com/WitCustomControls . Controls are: Screenshot control for easily getting & attaching screenshots and WebSiteControl where a website can be hosted inside...

This week I am moving over to new team in Microsoft. I love workitemtracking and TFS, but I need to move out of country for family reasons and hence had to leave TFS. So I am not expecting to write anymore posts on TFS. I *might* start writing more on...