Customizing Work Items in Visual Studio

Customizing Work Items in Visual Studio

As commonplace "Customizing Work Items" sounds like, I was slightly surprised to find out that some companies still use the default MSF methodology templates comes with Team System, not because the templates fits to their needs, because they didn't know that is possible to customize a work item in Visual Studio Team System.

Customizing Work Item Types in Team System isn't quite as easy as it should be, but it's not difficult.

The Work Items are actually XML. To export them, you use the command line utilities witimport and witexport, which are located in the
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE path by default.

Here's how to export a specific work item type:

witexport /f C:\CurrentBugTemplate.xml /t teamsystem /p ShaiProject /n "Bug"

Once you download the work item type XML files, you'll need to edit the resulting XML files to make whatever changes you need in the Work Items. There's some good guidance at MSDN on making common Work Item Type edits:

• Walkthrough: Make Basic Customizations to a Work Item Type
• Walkthrough: Make Advanced Customizations to a Work Item Type
• Walkthrough: Administer Fields in a Work Item Type

But editing raw XML still isn't my idea of a good time. You can make the experience slightly more pleasurable by adding IntelliSense to Visual Studio 2005 for Work Item Type XML. Rob Caron describes how. It's quite easy.

1. Download the process template schemas from the MSDN help topic Process Template Schemas Download.
2. extract the contents to: %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Xml\Schemas

After you copy the schemas to the right place, restart the IDE and you'll discover some shiny new IntelliSense when you begin editing the Work Item XML:

Once you're done making edits, validate your changes to make sure you didn't break anything.

witimport /f C:\CurrentBugTemplate.xml /t teamsystem /p ShaiProject /v

There is no need to specify the Workitem type name in the witimport line,
the workitem type name located inside the schemas xml within the "WORKITEMTYPE" element. 

Then, if you're happy with the validation results, remove the /v flag to import the work item.

witimport /f C:\CurrentBugTemplate.xml /t teamsystem /p ShaiProject

And you're done! Wasn't that easy? OK, I wouldn't call it easy, but it's not too painful.