Hello,
We are investigating preserving the original start dates of tasks in TFS,
when initially populating a plan from TFS, for the next release – this will
likely have to mean that the new project’s default start date will be changed
to the start date (if any) of the oldest starting task that is being exported
from TFS, to allow the exported tasks to preserve their original start dates,
but new tasks added in MSProject will still get added with the current date
as the start date.
Meanwhile, below is a workaround, the reason behind the current behavior,
and some best practises for using TFS with MS Project.
Workaround
--------------
The default TFS mapping file specifies the StartDate MSProject field as
“Publish-only†– this means that the values for these fields are generated by
MS project and saved back to TFS, but they cannot be set in TFS such that
they show up in MS Project. This is because MS Project was intended to be the
scheduling engine for TFS tasks , and hence responsible for generating dates.
An unfortunate consequence of this design is issues like the ones below.
You can work around the issue by changing the TFS field mapping (using the
tfsfieldmapping utility) to remove the “PublishOnly="true"†attribute for the
StartDate MS Project field.
Note: Since a new project plan defaults to the current date as the default
start date, you will see some popups that say that the task start date is
before the project start date, when you use this workaround. You will need to
change the Project start date to get rid of the pop-ups.
Best practises
----------------
Exporting the same set of work items multiple times to Project is not the
recommended way of working with TFS data and MS Project. The TFS team is
currently working on usability fixes to our UI to make this experience more
intuitive.
Here are some best practices to use TFS with MS Project:
Initial creation of a project plan:
· To initially populate your project plan, you can use the
“right-click and export†from TFS (as you are doing below).
· Once the Project plan is created, you can modify the default start
date, change additional scheduling information (like setting per-person
calendars, etc).
· The Project plan (mpp file) needs to be saved off after this - the
most common place to save the Project plan is to save it in the SharePoint
location for the Team Project you are working in.
Working with TFS data in MS project after the plan has been created:
· Once the plan has been created, you can get refreshes to TFS data
by opening your project plan (mpp file) and clicking the “Refresh†button
under the TFS Addin in MSProject
· You can opt to bring in additional work items to schedule from TFS
by clicking the “Get Work Items†button.
· You can also add new work items to TFS and save your changes to
TFS, by clicking the “Publish†button.
Hope that helps.
Mareen Philip
MSFT - TFS.
