Developing and Enriching TFS

TeamSpec Skins Post

2011-06-10T21:20:00Z

We recently posted a great blog article explaining in detail how TeamSpec Skins work. This is a deep dive explaination of many powerful features of TeamSpec and how to make your requirements documents, using Microsoft Word, a much more intiutive and easy process.

Check out the post here:
http://community.teamsystemsolutions.com/blogs/teamspec/archive/2011/06/09/teamspec-skins-explained-in-detail.aspx

Cheers,
~Joe

Using Quick Search in TeamLook

2011-05-24T18:30:00Z

TeamLook provides you with three powerful ways to access work items from Outlook. They are the “Go to Work Item” function, the query, and the quick search. There is no faster way to access a work item than just clicking “Go to Work Item” and typing in the item’s ID number. This is very speedy, but not very helpful if you don’t know the ID of the work item you are looking for; and equally unhelpful if you are looking for multiple work items. Queries offer infinite customizability and are saved so that you can return to them. This makes them an invaluable organizational tool as well as a powerful search tool. But the process is lengthier and not every search should necessarily be saved.

Quick search occupies the perfect middle ground. It is far more modifiable than “Go to Work Item” and you don’t need to keep track of ID numbers. A quick is search much less time consuming than creating a new query. And often you only need to perform a search once, find what you are looking for, and move on. Also, quick search is customizable. TeamLook allows you to tailor your search tool to your needs.

To begin, type a keyword search into the quick search field in the TeamLook tab of the ribbon bar. Click the binoculars to the right of the search field to run the search.

Quick search is initially set to search the Title and Description of every work item hosted on your default Team Foundation Server. TeamLook will return your results in their own window.

As a default, TeamLook will list the ID numbers and Work Item Titles of the search results. To change what information is displayed right-click on a work item and select choose columns.

This opens a window in which you can choose what columns of information are displayed in your quick search results.

Displayed fields are listed on the right; available fields are listed on the left. To add a column, highlight the desired field in the available list and click the right-arrow to move it to the displayed list. To remove a column, highlight the unwanted field in the displayed list and click the left-arrow to move it to the available list. To change the order in which the columns appear, highlight a field in the displayed list and move it up or down with the up or down arrow buttons. Click “OK” to save your changes and return to your search results.
If you have found the work item you are looking for, double-click on it to open it. The quick search window will stay open in the background so that you can easily return to your results.

If you have either not found the item you are looking for, or have found too many work items, you can focus your search parameters and search again. There are four ways to modify your search:

You can change your search keywords, you can select a specific project on your server to search within (or select a different server) from the first drop-down menu, you can search only work items assigned to a specific person from the second drop-down, or you can search only work items in a specific state. Click “Search” to return your newly focused results.

You can also customize which work item fields are searched. Click “Query Fields…” in the quick search window to open a preferences window labeled “Select Fields to Query.”

This preferences window looks and behaves like the “Select Fields to Display” tool with which you change the information displayed in the quick search results. Select which work item fields you want to search when you run a quick search by moving fields between the available and searched lists. TeamLook will search the query fields that you specify here every time that you run a quick search. So by altering the “Query Fields…” you can tailor the quick search tool to your particular needs.

Hopefully this has made the functionality of the TeamLook quick search tool clear and has given you an appreciation for the power and possibility for personalization that it provides.

Attaching Outlook Artifacts to Existing Work Items

2011-05-19T16:29:00Z

TeamLook gives you the powerful ability to attach Outlook items to work items without deviating from your workflow. For instance, you may receive an email that pertains to a task that you have assigned your lead developer. Without even navigating away from that email, you can attach it to the pertinent work item. Your lead developer won’t have to stop what they are doing to read an email that you’ve just forwarded them. Instead, the information will be there in the work item, ready for when they address the task.

With TeamLook you can easily attach emails, events, and tasks to existing work items. To attach an email in your inbox to a work item, right-click on the email and select “Attach to Work Item.”

If the email that you want to attach is open in its own window, click “Attach to Work Item” in the TeamLook Section of the message’s ribbon bar.

To attach an event on your calendar to an existing work item, the process is the same. Right-click on the event and select “Attach to Work Item.”

The process begins the same for tasks on your to-do list. Also, you can attach multiple tasks, emails, or events to a work item at the same time. Just highlight the items you want to attach, right-click, and select “Attach to Work Item.”

Selecting “Attach to Work Item” in every one of these scenarios will take you to the “Attach Email To Work Item” window.

In this window, you will find and select the work item(s) that you want to attach the Outlook artifact(s) to. The first thing that you should do is select which Team Foundation Server the work item(s) are stored on from the first drop-down menu.

Once you have selected the proper server, you have three different options for how to find the pertinent work item(s). Select a search type by clicking the appropriate bubble. You can run a saved query that you select from the drop-down menu.

You can type in specific work item ID numbers (separating multiple IDs with commas).

Or you can run a title and type search.

When you’ve chosen and filled out the type of search you want to use, click Find to see your results.

Check the boxes of any work items that you want to attach the file(s) to. Then click “Attach and Open Work Item(s)” to review the attachments you have just made, or click “Attach and Close.”

Your emails, events, or tasks have been successfully attached to an existing work item (or items) and this update has been saved to the server. I hope that this explanation has been helpful, and has shown you how easily Outlook items can be connected to TFS items with TeamLook.

TeamLook Version 3.5 Released!

2011-04-04T23:40:00Z

It is finally here -- TeamLook v3.5 has been released to the world!

This took us a little longer than anticipated to get out the door. Mainly because we have been working on some incredible updates to TeamSpec, which in a round about way affect TeamLook (as there are many commonalities shared between our products). Most of the dialogs you see in one product are usable in either product and when we have to update the dialog to add better support for one product, invariably there are bugs that pop up in the other product.

Here are a list of the features we have added:

New Feature: Attach Email to Work Item through Right-Click!
New Feature: Areas and Iterations Dialog!
New Feature: Print Work Item (from Work Item Dialog)
New Feature: Support for Related Work Item Types when Creating Related
New Feature: Export to Excel and Project for queries and items

Please check out the TeamLook Download Page for the full information on our release notes:

http://www.teamsystemsolutions.com/teamlook/download.aspx

And keep your eyes open in the next week for updated versions of TeamSpec!

Cheers,
~Joe

TeamLook Templates - Explained in Detail

2011-03-16T22:50:00Z

There has been quite a few questions about how the TeamLook Templates functionality should be used in conjunction with your Outlook/TFS settings. Hopefully this post will help clear up some of those questions.

The Templates functionality falls in line with the TFS Power Tools templates for quickly creating work items. We can completely parse any templates you have defined through the TFS Power Tools. If you are constantly creating work items that all have similar fields and want to save yourself some typing, you can create templates for new work items that will pre-populate a bunch of the fields in the work item with the values you want.

Suppose you wanted to create 10 bugs that all had the following fields:

Title	PREFIX ISSUE:
Assigned To	Melroy Happydance
Area Path	TestCollection\Projects\Alpha
Iteration Path	TestCollection\Projects\Alpha\Next
Severity	Priority 0
Blocking	True

You could type in each of those work items and populate those values with those fields, or you could define a template that had all these fields worked out. You can do that using the TeamLook Templates product feature. Here are the basic steps to doing so…

Configuring your Templates

First you’ll want to configure the template(s) you want to use. In the case I am describing I will use a bug template for the project TeamLook. When you open this dialog you will be presented with a hierarchical display of the templates in a template path. You can change this to any path (network share, or local) to store your templates. Here at TeamSolutions, we use a network share so that we can all share our templates and the latest versions of those.

When you click the ‘New Template’ button, you’ll see a screen that looks very similar to a Work Item Form with a couple extra fields at the top. These are the fields that describe what the template is – in our case I will call it ‘Task – Next Release’.

Something else to notice above is that in the work item form below, the required fields all have a yellow background. This helps you identify which fields are going to be required before saving a new item – a good reference point for what might need default values. Above, I have highlighted the fields I changed from the defaults (blank).

Once you click ‘Save & Close’ you’ll see that this new Template shows up in your list...

Using your Templates

There are a variety of ways in which TeamLook exposes the Templates. First, if you right click on an email (or multiple emails), you’ll see an option for ‘Create from Template’. This will pop up a dialog for choosing which template you want to create a work item with. This can drastically reduce the amount of manual entry you have to do if there are 10-15 required fields in your work item definition!

Secondly, if you are in the reading pane of an email you will see the ‘Create from Template’ in the TeamLook Ribbon Bar.

The two methods above will open the ‘Work Item Templates’ dialog and allow you to create a work item from the email information. Lastly, if you are inside the ‘Manage Templates’ dialog, you can create new work items by clicking on a template and selecting ‘Create Work Item’. This will not base the new work item off an email, but rather, just a work item with the defaults filled out.

Once you have selected the template you want to use you’ll see a regular work item form pop-up, with the defaults filled out…

Hopefully this has given you a better understanding of how Work Item Templates can be beneficial with TFS.

Thanks,
~Joe

TeamSpec now supports TFS 2010 and Word 2010!

2010-05-26T22:47:00Z

I can't even count the number of emails I have received over the past four months asking one of two questions...

"Do you have a version of TeamSpec that works with TFS 2010 RTM?"

"Does TeamSpec support Word 2010?"

I suppose I could try and count up all the times I have got a voicemail, email, blog posting response, or even a letter in the mail! However interesting the results would be, I simply have better things to do -- such as write this posting, officially announcing support for Team Foundation Server 2010 and Microsoft Word 2010!

Here are some of the great new features:

Support for Microsoft Team Foundation Client 2010
Support for Microsoft Word 2010
Significant stability improvements for associate and skins
Other bug fixes.

Download a free trial version today from here: http://www.teamsystemsolutions.com/teamspec/download.aspx

TeamLook with Support for TFS 2010! Released

2010-04-28T23:32:00Z

It has been a long time in the making, but TeamLook with support for TFS 2010 has finally been released! Here are some of the highlights...

1. Full TFS 2010 (RTM) Support
2. New Query Manager with new query types support
3. Manage TFS Queries from Outlook view (via Right-Click)
4. Offline view for Work Items
5. Work Item Templates support - Allows populating common fields for new work items quicker.
6. Reading pane support for Queries and Work Items
7. Many other fixes and features!

Full TFS 2010 (RTM) Support

Directly from the screenshot below, you can see that we support the new Query Folders and Sub Queries. We also now support hierarchical work items just as Visual Studio does - directly within the query window. You can view your work items, and sub work items using the familiar method that VS uses.

New Query Manager with new query types support

We have completely redone the Query Manager. To add or edit queries, you simply do the logical thing in the query list... Right-Click on them! This will allow you to create queries, edit queries, or delete them. Once you have the query opened, you'll see that it is very familiar and similar to VS. Welcome to the new Query Manager -- its much improved, yet very familiar!

Offline view for Work Items

When you run a query, TeamLook stores all the information about that query that you normally see on the website. We keep this around so that you can use Desktop search to find those work items later. Further, since we download all this informatino about the work items, you can review them when you don't even have a connection to your TFS server!

Work Item Templates Support

Previously only available in the TFS Power Tools, the templates allowed you to easily set "default" values for work item fields so that creating a bunch of work items wasn't so repetative. We have pulled this feature into TeamLook (and Outlook), so that creating work items through office is even easier.

With all these great new features in the new TeamLook v3, don't be the last one to upgrade!

TeamLook with Support for TFS 2010 - Features Video

2010-02-25T22:04:00Z

There have been many requests asking for support of TeamLook with TFS 2010. We have listened to the requests, and we now have something to show for it! The delay in support was not because we weren't listening, but because there have been many great new features we have been waiting to support. Here is a taste of some of those features...

(Please visit the site to view this media)

As you can see there have been MANY great new changes to the UI which allow much richer integration with Outlook! Offline support is now much more robust -- allowing you to have a complete snapshot of a work item even if you aren't connected. Plus - The new hierarchical work items will be fully exposed and supported in this upcoming release.

We are diligently working on this release and hope to have all the minor kinks worked out in the coming weeks. Look for an updated build, posted on our site, in the very near future!

TeamSpec with TFS 2010 Features Video

2010-02-15T22:45:00Z

Recently we announced that we will be simultaneously be releasing TeamSpec with the release of VS 2010 and TFS 2010. The video below highlights the benefits of TeamSpec supporting the new features of TFS 2010.

(Please visit the site to view this media)

As you can see TeamSpec now supports all the great new features of TFS 2010. For more information and to get a trial of this product yourself, please visit our Downloads page!

TeamSpec and Team System Solutions in the news!

2010-01-20T03:05:00Z

Recently there was a great article about the new ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) tools and features found in VSTS 2010. TeamSpec was referenced through our old company, Personify Design:

"Microsoft is also seeing a rise in requirements management solutions from companies like Personify Design..."

Read the full article here.

Note: Personify Design spun off TeamLook and TeamSpec into its own brand (and company) called TeamSolutions, LLC in early 2009.

Word 2007 Ribbon not showing TeamSpec Images

2009-11-09T17:50:00Z

The Word 2007 Ribbon bar can be a little finicky at times (to say the least). There have been numerous posts elsewhere on how to manipulate the Ribbon bar to show what you want, but not much else that explains errors and problems you sometimes encounter when writing add-ins utilizing the Ribbon bar.

Since we originally released the first Beta of TeamSpec, well over a year and a half ago now, we have received a handful of reports that sometimes the Ribbon bar will not show the Images that go with the buttons (see below). Internally, we encounter this very infrequently which makes tracking this issue down extremely difficult. Plus, everyone knows how developers can be... "Hey, it didn't repro on my machine, so it isn't a bug!" :)

As it turns out, if there is an operation that takes a little time to complete (more than a second or so from our testing), during the loading of the Ribbon bar, the Ribbon loading UI will silently fail and quit processing the remainder of the Ribbon loading. Images are one of the last things that are populated when building the Ribbon, so if you have a configuration file that you are reading to determine what should show on the ribbon, and your computer is under heavy disk load, you may see this error. Here is what the ribbon should look like:

For other Ribbon UI developers, make sure that your ribbon loading code is very small and that you are not doing any additional processing in the ribbon logic to avoid this problem for your add-ins.

TeamSpec/TeamLook for VSTS 2010

2009-09-21T16:38:00Z

There have been many great emails to our info/support alias asking about TFS 2010 support. Here are the common questions/answers that we get...

First Question: Will TeamLook/TeamSpec be supporting TFS 2010?

The answer is finally here -- YES! TFS 2010 has always been on our roadmap for supporting and extending TeamSpec and the rest of the TeamSolutions product suite for quite some time. The changes that are being released for TFS 2010 are a great compliment to the feature set already existing in both our products.

Second question: Will TeamLook/TeamSpec support TFS 2010 Beta 1?

Unfortunately, the answer is No. There are two reasons for this. Primarily its because we are not ready to release support for the applications yet. We haven't completed our internal testing and we don't want to prematurely release something that isn't "Show Ready". Secondly, there are some compatibility issues with how we build TeamLook/TeamSpec (using VS 2008) and how MS built some of the new controls for TeamExplorer 2010 Beta 1 (requiring applications to have been built targeting the .Net 4.0 Framework). We have been told by Microsoft that they are fixing this in future releases of TeamExplorer 2010, however for now we cannot load some of the controls on the Work Item Tracking screen.

Third Question: Can I be part of a beta pilot program when you are getting close with TeamSpec/TeamLook for TFS 2010?

We are working with select customers that absolutely have to have support for TFS 2010. If you are interested in joining this group, contact info@teamsystemsolutions.com.

Cheers,
~Joe