Background
It usually took me hours to add all tasks for my team for the next sprint in TFS. Existing UIs for this purpose were too sl-o-o-o-w, both built-in Team Explorer and Web Access (I mean Web Access for TFS 2010; 2012 is better in this context). The most annoying thing is that I usually need to specify just title and estimate for tasks but have to wait until the whole complex task entry form is loaded and then closed.
I also found bulk work items generation by means of Excel is not that convenient for addition of hierarchical (parent-child) data.
So I made a small utility for this purpose. Details and source code can be found here:
Using the Tool
The main form is divided in 3 parts:
- main menu: You can select a TFS project here, specify an area and/or an iteration to filter displayed work items and select a template for tasks creation. The default template containing all required fields is created automatically for each project. You can add more templates in case of need.
- left panel: The work items tree is displayed here; it can be filtered by area and/or iteration. You also can load a selected item specifying its ID.
- right panel: Tasks template is displayed here; fields that should be the same for all new tasks are listed in the top part (e.g. State); items that should be unique for each item (e.g. Title) are listed in the grid below. The grid supports pasting data copied from Excel.
Use Task Template -> Manage Templates menu item to create/edit/delete tasks templates.
Build Details
The solution requires Team Explorer for Visual Studio 2010 (or newer) to be installed. It has references to Microsoft.TeamFoundation.*.dlls which provide TFS API.
