TFS and MS Project

I did a dev plan for a next version of my project using MS Project 2003. We have MS TFS as a source control in our company. When I start a new project I found an option to connect MS TFS. After choosing a team project MS Project connect it and I was able to access all area paths, work item types, iteration paths etc. After creating some tasks I was able to publish them on the server. It is also possible to get values from the server using get work items option. These options are accessible via main menu named "Team" or using a Team tool bar.

When some field value is wrong and MS TFS doesn’t accept it MS Project will open a nice window alloing you to fix the problem. It even will show what field is worng. Wrong field background is yellow painted.

There is a unpleasent effect. Sometimes when I try to change some value which is MS TFS connected like item State I get an error. It also appears when publishing after a warning message which says that the field is read only. The problem is that "some" field is read only for item Task but the message doesn’t say which field. It is not nice that you can assign many people to perform a task in MS Project document but it will not be accepted by MS TFS project task.

I don’t like that I cannot add a description into project document which should be transfered to related item into MS TFS. As I found there is fields of project document that represent fields of MS TFS item. You can find this mapping in main menu Team/View Column Mappings.

A real problem is that when I try to publish document items and an error appears not all items are updated. After that in the next publish operation not updated items are created again. I think that the problem is that items are published but their task IDs in MS Project document are not updated and in the next publishing these items are recreated on the server.

It is a problem if you want to disconnect project document from TFS project. There is a nice post about this problem at MSDN forums

No matter the problems I have with this MS Project option I like it because it is really nice that it is possible to operate with data from MS TFS project in project document :).