Professional Visual Studio® 2008

58.9. TFS Automation and Process Customization

Throughout the chapter you have seen how the process templates define most of the behavior of TFS; for example, they define work item types, process guidance, and reports. To close the chapter we will briefly introduce how you could customize a process template or edit work item types.

To edit either work item types or process templates, you could modify the XML that defines them, but it's easier to use the Process Editor, which is part of the Team Foundation Server Power Tools, downloadable from the Microsoft site.

58.9.1. Work Item Types

From the Tools Process Editor Work Item Types menu, you can open a work item type directly from an existing team project and start to edit it. Working this way will cause all your changes to be immediately propagated to all users. Another approach is to export the work item type to a file and then open it for editing and finally import it back to a team project. All these options are located in the same sub-menu.

I recommend having a team project dedicated to testing changes before importing or editing work item types in active team projects.

Once you are editing a work item type, either directly from a team project or from a file, you will have three tabs to work with — Fields, Layout, and Workflow ...