Two interesting things have happened in the last couple of days - I've had another patch accepted into the Mozilla source code repository, and I've driven to Wagga Wagga with Roger, Gary and Dat to attend the 2006 CodeCamp.

The Mozilla patch fixes a problem that some users had noticed with Firefox 1.5 when they were pasting web content into Outlook 2000 plain-text emails. An unusual case, but it looks like the fix was pretty simple and didn't break the functionality for other users. The patch is checked in to the "trunk" and should make it into Firefox 2.0 - I'll try to get it into a future 1.5 update but that may be over optimistic.

The drive to Wagga went well. It's good to have Dat along on this trip (he couldn't make CodeCamp last year). So far the presentations have been really good, though I confess I (again) didn't pay attention in the BizTalk session :-)

This is interesting - it's a sample that generates work items in Team Foundation Server when a .NET application has application errors or performance problems.

The only problem I can see is that it apparently requires MOM on the server where the applications are deployed.

We currently just generate e-mails with the exception details and send them to the developers. Still, if the dependency on MOM could be removed then this could be useful.

SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1 has been released

There are also "April" releases of a number of other SQL 2005 tools:

• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Upgrade Advisor
• Feature Pack for SQL Server 2005 Apr 2006
• SQL Server 2005 Samples and Sample Databases (April 2006)

Wouldn't it be nice to have your work items in Team Foundation Server default to be "unassigned", so that it is easier to determine what jobs are being worked on and what are unallocated?

Well it turns out this is possible.

First of all, you need to export the work item definitions that you want to customise:

Now open these .xml files, locate the "Assigned To" field and update it to be the following:

      <FIELD name="Assigned To" refname="System.AssignedTo" type="String" reportable="dimension">

        <HELPTEXT>The person assigned to do the work</HELPTEXT>

          <ALLOWEDVALUES expanditems="true">

              <LISTITEM value="[Project]\Project Administrators" />

              <LISTITEM value="[Project]\Contributors" />

          </ALLOWEDVALUES>

          <PROHIBITEDVALUES>

              <LISTITEM value="Project Administrators" />

              <LISTITEM value="Contributors" />

              <LISTITEM value="domain\tfssetup" />

          </PROHIBITEDVALUES>

      </FIELD>

What this does is limit the users that are displayed in the "Assigned to" drop-down list box to be just the direct project administrators and contributors.

Import these back into TFS:

Next, from Team Explorer, right-click on the team project and select Team Project Settings | Group Membership.
Click on the 'New' button and create a new project group named "Unassigned".
Select the [Project]\Contributors group and add the [Project]\Unassigned group as a member.
Now, select the team foundation server from with the Team Explorer, and right-click and 'Refresh' to reload the new templates.