Question

I’m a big fan of TFS, but unfortunately they seem to have omitted any sort of method of linking to individual items (be they work items, documents, or files under version control). This blog post discusses using TSWA Power Tools to link directly to things (which is useful for building linkified notification emails), but that is not sufficient since I need for any user to be able to easily copy/paste a link to send to someone else. Are there any frontends other than TSWA that provide good linking abilities?

How do you ‘get to’ things on your Team Foundation Server, be they docs needing review, work items needing input, or files under source control using TFS? Surely everyone isn’t passing around 5-6 digit ID’s?

Answer 1

We currently use Team System Web Access (TSWA), Visual Studio 2008 Team System (VS2008) and the sharepoint project portal to access our workitems, code, reports, etc. As a general rule, developers mostly use VS2008, while testers, business analysts, project managers, business owners, etc use TSWA.

When you say you need ‘any user to be able to easily copy/paste a link to send to someone else’, I would generally say that is easier to do in TSWA. TSWA is free, and does not require a client install. You just have to pay for a TFS client license for each user.

Having said that, you can get a URL to a workitem with Visual Studio by performing the following actions:

1) Open the workitem in VS.Net (I am using VS.Net 2008)

2) The bug opens in a new tab in the VS.Net work area. Right Click on the tab name.

3) Click ‘Copy Full Path’.

4) The result is a URL that looks something like this:

  http://teamfoundation:8080/WorkItemTracking/WorkItem.aspx?artifactMoniker=9999 

You can also use the ‘Copy Full Path’ on Builds, which have a URL that looks like:

  http://teamfoundation:8080/Build/Build.aspx?artifactMoniker=9999 

Interestingly, there was a ‘Copy Full Path’ contect menu for Team Queries, but the URL it gave me did not work. I do not know if this is just a setup issue with our TFS instance.

You can get a URL to a Changeset. You cannot use the ‘Copy Full Path’ context menu because you cannot open a changeset in its own tab. I found this URL by opening a workitem URL as instructed above, and clicking on the associated changeset. The URL looks like:

  http://teamfoundation:8080/VersionControl/Changeset.aspx?artifactMoniker=97418 

I do not know of a way to do this for files under version control. You can link directly to the portal for reports and documents.