Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Contents of a Changeset when Accessing via a Work Item Link

UPDATE: I'm smoking crack. There is a slight change to the use case below. I left the original use case in there for an example of what works fine. The behavior I was seeing works the same in both VS 2008 and VS 2010. Sorry for the trouble of this post.

Using Visual Studio 2010 connecting to a TFS 2008 Server I can’t seem to get the nice dialog box to look at the contents of a Changeset that is linked to a Work Item. When I double click on it, I get a IE window that shows the contents in an HTML page, but I don’t have a dialog open up where I can do things like Right Click and compare to Previous Version. This is annoying as I use this feature all the time for code reviews and bug fix approvals.

I tried putting on TFS 2010 Power Tools, but this too did not give me the option. Tomorrow I’ll try to connect to a TFS 2010 Server instance to see if that changes the behavior. We have a number of people that use this procedure for code reviews and I can see some upset faces if we don’t have a better solution. Here is the exact use case again:


1) Open a Work Item
2) Click on Links
3) Double Click on Changeset.
4) This opens IE with the contents instead of a dialog box.


1) View History on a file in Source Control
2) Double Click on Changeset
3) Click on Work Item
4) Click on Links
5) Double Click on Changeset
6) Here is where I get IE popping up.

Oddly, I get the Changeset dialog box fine when I go directly to a Work Item to the linked Changeset. It's when I got to a Changeset to a Work Item to its linked Changesets that I get IE popping up.

Again, in VS 2008 this would give you a dialog box where you can do things like compare to previous version. In VS 2010, this seems to give me only a popup to IE.

Maybe I’m missing something? Yes you are Mac. This works the same in VS 2008 and VS 2010.