tirsdag 9. august 2011

Work item blow-up when editing Team Foundation Queries in Excel

I have just completed a manual rollback on loads of work items due to a unexcepted feature in Excel. Be warned: do not try this on work items in progress!

This is the receipe
1. Open a WIT query in Excel

2.  Now go to a line in the top of the query region sheet.


3. Select row (Shift + Space) and copy (ctrl + C)
4.And now maks a big mess of all your work items by pasting this line as a new row (CTRL + +):

As you can see, the content of my work items has now been shifted down one row, except the ID column!

I have now effectively rewritten all my work items, that goes for content and all relations!

And, no, I did not see this until i had published my changes...

Together with two of my colleague’s we spent 4 hours straight to correct every WIT back to original state. We had to use the WIT history log to revert any changes. It was a big mess, so I warn you people BE very careful when editing your backlog items using Excel.