Hidden Gems in TFS–Part 11 Sharing work the easy way

In this series of blog posts I like to highlight some features of TFS/Visual Studio that people seem to overlook. In my day to day job I often see that people don’t know about certain feature that are available in Team Foundation Server, Visual Studio or some of the Powertools.

Some features are available as a Powertool. These can be downloaded from here

Earlier Posts

• Hidden Gems in TFS – Part 1 Annotate
• Hidden Gems in TFS – Part 2 Work Item State Diagrams
• Hidden Gems in TFS – Part 3 Editing multiple work items at the same time (Bulk Edit)
• Hidden Gems in TFS – Part 4 Finding status in Source Control
• Hidden Gems in TFS – Part 5 Handling alerts and notifications
• Hidden Gems in TFS – Part 6 Managing workspaces in TFS with Workspace templates
• Hidden Gems in TFS–Part 7 Searching and Finding Work Items in Team Foundation Server
• Hidden Gems in TFS 2012–Part 8 Related Work Items in a Build Report
• Hidden Gems in TFS 2012–Part 9 Image compare in TFS Version Control
• Hidden Gems in TFS–Part 10 Editing multiple work items at the same time (Bulk Edit) Updated for TFS 2012

In this part……

Sharing work the easy way

In your day to day job, you sometimes need to share information by sending someone a link. A link to a work item, a link to a work item query. TFS and Visual Studio provide many different ways of sharing this information. In this post I want to talk about some of them.

Sharing a work item URL

If you work in Visual Studio and you want to send a link to the work item in Web Access, just open the work item, right click the Tab, and select [Copy Full Path]. When you paste this in a browser you will be automatically send to the right place.

The same works for Work Item Queries

Sharing work item details

If you want to provide a little more detail, just right click the work item form and choose [Send Work Item to Microsoft Outlook]

It provides you with some details and also a link.

The same works for Work Item Query. Just right click the query in Team Explorer and choose send to Microsoft Outlook.

Within Team Room

If you are already familiar with the new Team Room feature in TFS 2013, you can also use this place to share information.

To easily put a link to a work item just type #WORKITEMID to refer to a work item. For example [Bug #1207]

Hope this makes your life a bit easier!