Experiences migrating TFS XML Team Project Templates to Inherited Team Project Templates

You have always been able to customise your Team Projects in TFS, by editing a host of XML files, but it was not a pleasant experience. In VSTS a far more pleasant to use web based inherited customisation model was added, much to, I think, most administrators relief.

If you used the TFS DB migration service you ended up with a VSTS instance full of the the XML style team projects, and you were stuck there, with no way to change these to the new inherited mode, that is until now as Microsoft have released to preview a conversion tool.

I have been trying this tool to migrate all our active XML based team projects to Inherited equivalents, and it has worked very well for me, but I have to say, we don’t have any hugely complex customisations, so your mileage may vary depending on how much you modified your XML based team project templates.

However, I wanted to go further than the basic process as documented

Since moving to VSTS all our new team project have been created  using an inherited template based on Scrum. I wanted to move all our active XML based team project to this standardised template. This took a little extra work.

The basic process is easy as to change Inherited Process you

1. In the instance admin page https://[instance].visualstudio.com/_settings/process pick the target template
2. Click on the ellipse (…) and pick ‘Change team project to use ….’
3. Pick the team project you wish to migrate and you are done

REMEMBER: A really nice touch (with XML and Inherited templates) is that you can just switch back if you don’t like the result, no data is lost when you swap templates, but some of it might be hidden as fields are not shown on the new work item types.

The problem I had was that our old XML based team project templates had different customisation to our current inherited standard. To address this I needed to

• Adding a few fields to our standard inherited template based on Scrum, for critical legacy customisations
• In one case a work item types in use in the XML template had no match in our current template. In this case I changed the work item type to it’s equivalent (we had used a variety of ‘flavours of PBI’ so this was not a major problem), adding a tag to the work items to they could be identified, then deleting the offending work item type.
• I could conceive of a need for more complex remapping for work item types and fields, but I was able to avoid this.

So once done, I was then able to migrate all the team project to my target process template.

So a very nice experience, and one that now means we can make sure all our team projects use the same set of customisation. No longer do we need to worry about customising in XML and Inherited models.