A question that pops up reasonably regularly when showing the Excel integration into TFS is how it deals with conflicts, e.g. a work item is updated by someone else not using Excel, and then you try and update (publish) the same work item from Excel. I thought it was worth a quick post to show what happens.
There are many possible scenarios but I’ll take a simple one:
The developer is, say, using the Iteration Backlog query (I’ve renamed it in this project to Sprint Backlog), and working on task 430, Implement Business Rules:
At the same time, another team member opens up the same (or another) query in Excel:
The developer now updates the name of task 430, now becoming Implement the happy path business rules:
Meanwhile, the other team member has updated the name of task 430 to Implement the main flow for the business rules:
There is no issue in Excel at this stage because this has not been published back to TFS; it’s effectively off-line at the moment. Now the Excel user publishes changes to TFS and sees a dialog warning of publishing errors:
This shows that (in this simple case) there is one work item, with one conflicting field. I can now decide which version I am going to accept - either my local version or the already saved server version, but I don’t end up over-writing someone else’s update by accident.
Cheers, Giles