TFS Tips

Date Published: 16 January 2008

TFS Tips

I’m just wrapping up a long article on Team System 2008 and its new capabilities, especially its continuous integration support and build server improvements. In the course of researching for this article, I found a couple of tips that didn’t really fit into the scope of the article, but I wanted to call attention to them. The first one addresses a pain point of mine, which is the default action when you associate a work item with a check-in. By default, the default check-in action for such work items is Resolve, when it probably should default to Associate.

95% of the time I want it to be Associate. 5% of the time I might want it to be Resolve (but really I don’t because I never resolve anything I re-assign ownership to the project lead and let them resolve/close the items). But it’s a hassle to touch the check-in action every time, and sometimes I forget. So, the first tip is how to remove the Resolve Check-In Action from a Work Item, from Martin Woodward. I haven’t implemented this tip yet myself, and it doesn’t change the default, it just removes the Resolve option, but it still looks like something I will probably implement.

The second item is also from Martin Woodward, and provides some advice for setting up a folder structure in TFS version control. I’m always interested in how others set up their project folder structures, since I tend to work on small teams and on web projects that do not have definitive version drops. I like to see what works for other teams who need to branch and version, and Martin’s post on Folder Structure in Team Foundation Server Version Control is good for that, and includes a few good comments as well.

Steve Smith

About Ardalis

Software Architect

Steve is an experienced software architect and trainer, focusing on code quality and Domain-Driven Design with .NET.