MS Project 2010 resets durations and start | finish dates when publishing to TFS 2010

Question

<div class="container"><div class="body"><p><strong>I have a TFS 2010 project in which I created work items from a copy of a&nbsp;project plan in&nbsp;MS Project 2007 -- Management wants to keep the original plan ISOLATED from TFS to prevent any "incidents" with the planned scheduling. All worked well. Then my MS Project was upgraded to 2010.</strong></p><p><strong>Now management has updated their original plan and wants&nbsp;a fresh COPY used to update TFS.&nbsp;When I published it to TFS (planning on deleting the previously created work items), MS Project changes the Start | Finish dates and sets durations for all published tasks to zero. </strong></p></div></div>

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Rich Wilson

Answer 1

My apologies: The original question was scrambled in some copy-paste glitch.

Management created a project plan in MS Project 2007, which they want to keep separate from TFS to guard against unintended consequences. I used a copy of their project plan to create tasks in a TFS 2010 project I had previously created. At their request I would make an additional copy of the MS project plan at a future date if they made significant edits to it, and use that to re-publish the new tasks to TFS as work items. All worked well in the first cycle: work items were created, TFS looked good, and the MS project plan looked good.

Then my MS Project was upgraded to 2010. And management made huge changes to the plan by adding new tasks and resources. When I made a fresh copy and published it to TFS, (a) all existing tasks were duplicated in TFS; (b) all new tasks in MS Project were added to TFS; (c) all durations in MS Project for all tasks published to TFS were set to zero; and (d) all start | finish dates in MS Project for all tasks published to TFS were adjusted accordingly.

Not good. While I can deal with the duplicates (via witadmin), we all know this 18 month project will not be finished in three weeks. Worse, this seems to make the TFS reporting features almost useless.

While I know we've gone about this whole process in a non-orthodox (and probably very trouble-inducing) process, I welcome any and all suggestions...

Thanks!

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Rich Wilson

Answer 2

This is a 'feature', not a bug. By default (in tthe Project mappings of Project) the StarteDate and EndDate fields are set to PublishOnly. This means that Project Server will not retrieve the current values from TFS when it imports items and also means that it will override the data in TFS with the newly calculated values.

The idea behind it is that, if you want to use Project or Project Server, then that should be leading from a planning perspective. This is also why in MSF CMMI the date fields are readonly.

To disable this 'feature' edit the project mapping in Project change the Start and End date fields to have PublishOnly="no".

If needed edit your process template to remove the readonly constraint from the start and enddate fields so that you can change these fields from Team Explorer as well.

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My blog: blog.jessehouwing.nl

Answer 3

Hi EveningFog,

Thanks for your post!

I marked the Jesse's reply as answer, if you have any concern with it, please feel free to unmark it.

Best Regards,

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Cathy Kong [MSFT]
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