TFS is a great tool – don’t get me wrong – but there are some things conspicuously missing from TFS out-of-the-box and the TFS Power Tools. One of these is a way to update work items published to a large number of projects. Certainly, you can use the witadmin command-line tool to import work items or, if the command-line frightens you, you can use the Work Item Import tool in the TFS Power Tools. While both of these work fine, they only import a single work item into a single project. And here’s where TFS fails the TFS administrator that is responsible for an implementation with many projects – you could spend all day importing a single work item across 100 projects. And if you have to import multiple work items? Well, there goes your vacation.
So … let’s break this down. You have a highly repetitive task and differs by only a couple of variables that you want to do over and over and over again. Sounds like a good application of our old friend, the looping construct, right? In fact, it certainly is. Let’s start with what we need to do to import a single work item into a single project:
private void ImportWorkItem(string workItemFilePath, Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.Project project)
{
//Need to get the raw XML for the work item.
var fileInfo = new System.IO.FileInfo(workItemFilePath);
string workItemXml = String.Empty;
using (var reader = fileInfo.OpenText())
{
workItemXml = reader.ReadToEnd();
reader.Close();
}
//Import ...
project.WorkItemTypes.Import(workItemXml);
}
Really … it is that simple.
The fun part comes when you want to take this simple concept and wrap it up in a nice pretty bow that allows a TFS Admin to update multiple work items across multiple projects. It’s not hard … except for the fact that I am UI-challenged and anything that is functional and looks somewhat usable is not my strong suit. But … I did manage to get it done. Here it is:
Running the tool is pretty straightforward. Start the EXE. It will then prompt you to select a Team Project Collection, which gets you to this screen. Use “Browse…” to select the work item files that you want to import. These should be in the same format as you would use in the project template. Then you select the projects that you want them imported into. Hit OK and away it goes. It will take a few minutes, so go get yourself some coffee. Or Mountain Dew. Then relax and surf the web a bit … after all, you did tell the boss that this was a tedious, time-consuming process right?
You can download this tool on MSDN Code Samples.