The “Assign To” field in TFS 2008

A quite common customer’s demand is to narrow the Assign To combo box in work item’s form in TFS. By default this field displays all the valid members of TFS server.

The most reasonable (and common) choice for this field is the members of the project’s Contributors group.

If this is what you need, follow these steps:

1) Install Team Foundation Power Tools in your client machine. 

2) In Visual Studio 2008, go to Tools –>Process Editor->Work Item Types->Open WIT from Server

3)Select the work item of your choice (task, bug, etc)

4) Double Click on the “Assign To” field

5) On the Field Definition form, select the Rules tab. Delete the default value (VALIDUSER) and click Add. In the popup form add the [Project]\Contributors.  

Press OK to all dialogs and save the Work Item template in your server.

That’s it. Click refresh in Team Explorer and try to add a new work item, check the Assign To combo box values….

The same seems to work in TFS 2010 RC as well.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 28, 2010
  It gives me an error saying that the account name mentioned is not recognized

• Anonymous
  July 12, 2010
  It should work, you can eve use literal texts in the value (like the "unassigned") - check this social.msdn.microsoft.com/.../b24eadee-448f-4072-940e-9d7c75f2f69c BTW do not replace the [project] with your project's name... HTH

• Anonymous
  December 08, 2010
  Hi, if i try this. the Assign To DropDown only show "Contributors", and not the Users of the Contributors Group.