Ewald Hofman (MSFT)

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Deprecation of the Team Rooms in Team Services and TFS

January 4th, 2017
Modern development teams heavily depend on collaboration. People want (and need) a place to monitor activity (notifications) and talk about it (chat). A few years back, we recognized this trend and set out to build the Team Room to support these scenarios. Since that time, we have seen more solutions to collaborate emerge in the market. Most ...

Quickly navigate with keyboard

February 12th, 2016
Shortcuts have been in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and Team Foundation Server (TFS) for a long time, but not many keyboard shortcuts were available and it was not discoverable. Since a few deployments we have introduced more shortcuts using the MouseTrap open source library. You can now type in keys whenever you are not focused on an ...

Receive an error when resolving a bug created by your build?

January 7th, 2016
When you create a new build definition, you have the option to create a bug when the build failed. (image)   If you activate this option, it is possible that you will receive the following error message when resolving the bug: The field 'Assigned To' contains the value '[DefaultCollection]Project Collection Service Accounts' that is not ...

User Voice site for Team Services has moved to its own area

November 20th, 2015
The Visual Studio brand represents a suite of tools for every developer and every app, and includes three components We want to hear from you how we can improve our products, and many of you have already added your great suggestions at our User Voice site. Not too long ago I explained how we use User Voice. Today is a small change in how ...

Process Template changes to TFS 2015 RTM

October 8th, 2015
With the release of TFS 2015, we have also updated the process templates. All of these changes were done to: Many of you have requested a list of the improvements that we have made to the process templates, so here we go.Template changes Workflow changes Field changes...

How we use User Voice to make a better product

October 8th, 2015

Where is the field on the work item form to order the backlog?

July 8th, 2014
In our latest deployment to Visual Studio Online on July 1, we have removed the Stack Rank (Agile / CMMI) or Backlog Priority (Scrum) field from the work item form. The backlog uses that field to order the items and updates the field to arbitrary values, which caused confusion. If you are interested in the detailed background, please read a ...

Behind the scenes: the Backlog Priority or Stack Rank field

May 14th, 2014
The backlog in TFS is an ordered list of work items, such as the product backlog. In Scrum you get the ordered list of PBIs and Bugs, in Agile you will see User Stories and CMMI contains the Requirements and Change Requests. The order of the backlog items is dictated by the the “Order” field as defined in the process configuration. The ...

Update your Overview and Progress reports to support the Portfolio backlogs

October 22nd, 2013
In TFS 2010 we released the reports to show the overview of the backlog and the progress of the these items. It depends on your process template which reports were installed for you:ScrumBacklog OverviewAgileStories OverviewStories ProgressCMMIRequirement OverviewRequirement Progress The reports contain logic to rollup information to PBI...

Upgrade your 2012 team project from RTM to Update 2

April 4th, 2013
In our effort to bring continuous improvements to the product, we have made improvements to the stock process templates in VS Update 2. If you have an account on our hosted service or when you create a new team project, your team projects are already updated with these changes. However if you have an on premises installation of TFS, the ...