Team Foundation Task Board Enhancer: version 2.7.9 released

Posted by Tiago Pascoal on November 4, 2013 30 comments

 

New release of Team Foundation Task Board Enhancer

This version only works on TFS 2012 with update 2 or update 3 installed, TFS 2012 (RTM or with Update 1) is no longer supported (you can still use version 0.7.6).

New Features in this release

This version brings some parity of features between the kanban board and the task board. It adds too much needed features to the kanban board.

Kanban Board new features

It now shows on the kanban board the blocked status of a kanban card

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And it also adds support for tags on the kanban board

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Task Board new features

If you set the preference to show the work item type in the requirements category and if the task board contained more than work item type then the work item type would be displayed. In this version besides seeing the work item type a color will also be shown for better visibility of different work items in the requirement category

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If you are using tags and enabled the preferences to show the tags counter, you could see the number of tags a card had associated, in this new version you can also see the tags associated with requirements

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Download

This version only works on TFS 2012 with update 2 or 3, there is no version for TFS 2012 (RTM or Update 1)

For Update 2 and upwards Download version 2.7.9 of the extension

Team Foundation Task Board Enhancer: version 2.7.8 released

Posted by Tiago Pascoal on October 12, 2013 6 comments

[Update 16 Oct] I’ve decided to remove this version from the download since it has a few annoying bugs. I will release a fixed version next week]

New release of Team Foundation Task Board Enhancer

This version only works on TFS 2012 with update 2 or update 3 installed, TFS 2012 (RTM or with Update 1) is no longer supported (you can still use version 0.7.6).

New Features in this release

This is mainly a bug fixing release. It fixes two bugs and I’ve managed to sneak in a performance improvement.

For some people using Internet Explorer (I couldn’t reproduce it,that is was it took so long to fix) the extension wouldn’t be loaded. One user sent me enough trace information so I finally could figure it out. I hope this is fix is final.

The extension wouldn’t do anything if board was loaded directly in team members view (or reloaded). This has now been fixed (everything would work when switching from backlog items view to team members).

The extension now fetches much less data from the server it is hard to quantify the speed improvement this will bring, since it depends on the number of work items a board has and the amount of data they hold, but on extreme cases I’ve seen a 400x improvement (very extreme cases, but for median values 5-10x speed improvements seems to be the norm).

All these changes only affect the task board, they don’t impact the Kanban board.

Download

[Update 16 Oct] This version has a few annoying bugs so I’ve decided to remove it. Expect a new version next week

TFS Work Item Tags: entering multiple tags in one swoop

Posted by Tiago Pascoal on October 7, 2013 2 comments

 

Update 2 for TFS 2012 brought us Work Item tagging, work item tags allows users to add tags in a free format way.

Besides adding tags to work items

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you can also filter backlog items by tags

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while the current work item tags have yet to fill all their potential since there is still a lot that can be done in terms of features. Tags can only be added/edited/viewed in Web Access, you cannot query work items by tags (some people for example want to limit the tags a user can choose,something I think would be too limiting and it goes against the self organization of teams).

But today I want to talk you about a little trick I discovered last week. I’m I mainly a keyboard person, the less I have to touch the mouse the better.

Entering a tag, already seemed fast you enter a tag, you press enter and you can immediately enter a new tag.

But I accidentally discovered you can enter multiple tags in a single sweep. If you use a comma, it will be considered a separator and two (or more) tags will be created. This is even faster.

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If you never heard or used work item tags, you can get a much more detailed description by Tarun Arora  on his blog post TFS2012 QU2 – New Feature – Work Item Tagging

Team Foundation Task Board Enhancer: version 2.7.7 released

Posted by Tiago Pascoal on July 30, 2013 24 comments

 

New release of my Team Foundation Task Board Enhancer (previous versions .7.6,  .7.5, .7, 2.6.2 (update2 only), 0.6.1, 0.6 , 0.5 , 0.4 , 0.3 , 02 and 0.1 ).

If you want to know what is Task Board Enhancer or want to see the full list of features, head on to the Task Board Enhancer page

 

This version only works on TFS 2012 with update 2 or update 3 installed, TFS 2012 (RTM or with Update 1) is no longer supported (you can still use version 0.7.6).

Based on the analysis on the downloads, there is now a big gap between version 2.x.x and 0.x.x version downloads and added to the fact that maintaining four different codebases takes quite some time (for something I’m doing on the free time that I do not have) so I’ve decided to drop versions support for TFS 2012 RTM (or update 1).

New Features in this release

This is mainly a bug fixing release.

I’ve only added a minor feature, it is now possible to display the user to which a requirement (product backlog item,….) is assigned to.

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This feature is configurable and it’s disabled by default. You can enable it on the preferences window

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Besides this feature I’ve fixed the following bugs

  • If pictures are enabled and a card has an assigned member it’s not possible to enter unassigned – If a card was assigned to an user and the show user images feature is enabled, then it wouldn’t be possible to set (on the card itself) the value to unassigned
  • When moving between team members and stories the id and state of the requirement are lost – If you switch the view to team members and then switch back to backlog items then the id and state was not visible on the requirements anymore.
  • In IE (8 and 9) when there is a large number of tasks the ids are not shown on all of them –If there was a large number of work items on the board (> 250) then on some browsers (I’ve could only reproduce it on IE8 but I’ve got some reports on IE9 also) only half of the cards would have their IDs displayed. I believe this also fixes some issues that have been reported (but I could never reproduce it) where sometimes the board failed to load on first attempt (a reload work work) on some versions of Internet Explorer

 

Download

This version only works on TFS 2012 with update 2 or 3, there is no version for TFS 2012 (RTM or Update 1)

For Update 2 and upwards Download version 2.7.7 of the extension