13 April 2009

Deleting Work Items in TFS – a UI

If you work with Work Items in VSTS/Team Foundation Server then you’ve probably had the desire to delete a work item at some point.  Sounds easy enough, right?  Just right-click a work item and select… wait, there’s no Delete option?  That’s right – the Team Foundation Client does not include any functionality for deleting work items from TFS.

Although it’s a tad inconvenient, you can delete work items from TFS by installing the Team Foundation Server Power Tools  (October 2008 release or greater).  Of the many features available as part of the power tools, there is a command called destroywi that can be used to delete work items.  For example, to delete the work item ID 1234, use the command:

tfpt destroywi /server:tfs-dev /workitemid:1234

Although this is a relatively straightforward task to perform, not everyone is comfortable with the command line interface not to mention you have to look up the work item ID(s) ahead of time.  To ease the process a little bit, I created a simple UI that sits on top of the Team Foundation Server Power Tools that allows you to easily select a Team Foundation Server and Project to query from.  You can run an existing query to display a list of work items from which you can select one or more work items to be deleted.  You can also enter the work item IDs directly (as a comma-separated list) if you prefer.

Here is a screen shot of the utility after running the All Work Items query for a Demo project:

image

When you select one or more work items to be deleted, click the Delete button.  You will be prompted to be sure you want to delete since the action cannot be undone (i.e. it’s permanent).

DISCLAIMER: We have been using this utility in multiple production environments for several weeks now and have not experienced any issues.  However, since this utility physically deletes work items from a Team Foundation Server (via the Team Foundation Server Power Tools), use at your own risk :-)

Download the Delete Work Item utility here.

09 April 2009

VSTS 2010 Feature List

Brian Harry has started a series of posts detailing the new features in Visual Studio Team System 2010.  In his first post, he lists the high-level features along with associated blogs that provide further details.  He will be drilling into more detail with future posts but this is a great list if you’re just wanting an idea of what’s new in VSTS 2010.

06 April 2009

Omaha Team System User Group

Due to the recent birth of our new son, Zachary, I am somewhat late in getting this post on-line.  Although I am a little behind in getting this posted, I still want to get the word out about our last presentation at the Omaha Team System User Group.

Jeremy-OTSUG On March 24th, Farm Credit Services of America (FCSA) once again hosted the user group meeting.  Many thanks go out to Russ Wagner for his continued help and for accepting the position as co-leader of the Omaha Team System User Group!

This meeting’s topic was presented by Jeremy Novak, a developer at Farm Credit Services of America.  Jeremy presented on a new open source product called Remote Test Runner – or, RTR. RTR was originally developed at FCSA for internal use to aid in the automation of customer acceptance testing (sometimes referred to as service-level testing).  RTR was published to Microsoft’s CodePlex site following the presentation.

Remote Test Runner is a unit test assistance tool that allows the user to exercise Visual Studio-based test classes outside of Visual Studio. RTR reports on Data-Driven tests at the data field level as opposed to the unit test method level. Failed asserts no longer abort a test.

For more details about RTR, check out this previous post or the RTR project site on CodePlex (link below).

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