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How To: Make “Associate” the default action for work items

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I’ve heard this one a lot lately from many people, so I felt it was time to share more broadly.  While there is no way to do this in the UI in TFS 2010, there is a registry key that we added late in our release cycle to allow users to configure the default work item association.

To make “Associate” the default action (instead of “Resolve”), set the registry key “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\TeamFoundation\SourceControl\Behavior\ResolveAsDefaultCheckinAction” to “False”. 

FWIW, in our next release, we’re fixing this experience so that you won’t need to hack the registry to change the behavior.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 03, 2010
    The registry key is not fully visible in your post: HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftVisualStudio10.0TeamFoundationSourceControlBehaviorResolveAsDefaultCheckinAction

  • Anonymous
    December 03, 2010
    The registry key is not fully visible(end is hidden) in your post: HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftVisualStudio10.0 TeamFoundationSourceControlBehaviorResolveAsDefaultCheckinAction

  • Anonymous
    August 19, 2012
    Could you tell me how to do that in TFS 2010, it seems that it is not possible change work item "Associate" in registry.

  • Anonymous
    August 19, 2012
    Sorry, I spell wrong, I mean how to do that in TFS 2012

  • Anonymous
    September 24, 2012
    Can this registry change be done on the TFS server to affect all projects, or does it need to be done on each team member's workstation?

  • Anonymous
    September 27, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 02, 2012
    Hi Matt, It seems that this no longer works in 2012.

  • Anonymous
    November 07, 2012
    Joshka - Can you try running "devenv /setup" after setting the registry key, and then restarting VS?  If that doesn't work, please email me at mmitrik at microsoft dot com.

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2012
    Hey Matt, Sorry about the long wait. It seems that adding the work item to the in progress work in the My Work tab sets the appropriate status (associate). Adding the work item to the Related Work Items in the Pending Changes tab however does not (it sets the status to resolved by default). Maybe this is expected behaviour? I updated both VS 10 and VS 11 keys, and ran devenv /setup (for both VS 10 and 11 versions of devenv) to no avail and restarts VS 2012 to check.

  • Anonymous
    April 08, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 15, 2013
    Agreed with Chris....this is kinda annoying. Is there a solution to this in VS2012? It works exactly like joshka describes....this isnt quite good enough. All my developers use pending changes to checkin, so items on our scrum board gets accidently moved to "closed" because, they accidently select resolved, when they really only wanted associate....

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2013
    Is there an updated fix for this issue?  It is causing issues for us as well.

  • Anonymous
    August 11, 2013
    It's been almost three years since request. Is it some kind of weird MS strategy? Like "associate by default is soooo 2010, we discourage it now"

  • Anonymous
    October 29, 2013
    Is there any update on this issue? We're also having same problem on my team as we check-in from Pending Changes... and then we have to incur the wrath of the irate Scrum Master when the TFS burn down is messed up.

  • Anonymous
    December 11, 2014
    is there an update for this? Millions of development teams are irritated daily by this.

  • Anonymous
    January 18, 2015
    Why is it such a big problem to solve this basic issue??? Come on Microsoft... wakey! wakey!...

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2015
    worked for me in VS2013. also this tool might be well liked by people here visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/d8d61cc9-6660-41af-b8d0-0f8403b4b39c allows you to "Diff all files" from the pending changes window instead of right click compare right click compare