Have you ever thought ‘I know that you get the Team ribbon in Excel to manage TFS work items, and I can use Excel to as a SQL/OLAP client to run reports from the TFS warehouse but I want to do more….’?

Have you every considered using VSTO to create an ActionPane that uses the TFS .NET API?

I recently noticed that I had a few too many ‘Typemock Isolator Quickstart’ help menu items in Visual Studio 2010

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Whilst try to record some manual tests in MTM for a new Silverlight application I found I was not getting any actions recorded, just loads of “Fail to record the object corresponding to this action” warnings in the actions window.

Turns out to fix this you have to do three things

1. Install the Visual Studio 2010 Feature …

Watching the keynote of TechEd 2011 there were some interesting announcements on the vNext for TFS (the TFS section starts about 1:20 into the keynote).

• Storyboarding Assistant – A new product using PowerPoint as the core tools to gather requirements
• New web based dashboard to help manage requirement work items, with …

In the 27th June I will be speaking on Lab Management at Microsoft’s “Application Lifecycle Management for Independent Software Vendors” event at TVP.

For more details see the Microsoft event site