Update a TFS team project manually to support code reviews

If you are working with TFS and have projects created in older versions you might want to use features available in newer versions of TFS (given that you have updated to such a newer version). These features could be code reviews, feedback, my work, storyboarding, and others. In this post, I will explain how to manually modify the team project settings to enable code review. You can only do this is you have proper access rights.

If you updated to TFS 2013/2015/2017/2018 and you go to My Work in Team Explorer, you get the following error:

To use My Work to multi-task and manage your changes, you must enable the feature on the server.
Click here to enable the new features

When you do that, you are directed to the administrative control panel, if you have appropriate access rights. Under your project’s profile you can find a link to configure features.

However, when you do that you will probably discover that your project cannot be configured automatically.

To configure the project manually, follow these steps:

1. In Visual Studio, go to Team > Team Project Collection Settings > Process Template Manager… and open it. From the manager window, download the appropriate process template. In this example I am using Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 2013. You are prompted to select a folder where the template files will be stored. For this example, let’s consider it was downloaded to your Documents folder.
   
2. Locate the witadmin.exe tool. For instance, for Visual Studio 2017 Professional the location is c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Professional\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TeamFoundation\Team Explorer\.
3. Run the following commands to import code review work item types:

   witadmin importwitd /collection:<yourcollectionurl> /p:<yourprojectname> /f:"c:\Users\<yourusername>\Documents\Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 2013\WorkItem Tracking\TypeDefinitions\CodeReviewRequest.xml"
   
   witadmin importwitd /collection:<yourcollectionurl> /p:<yourprojectname> /f:"c:\Users\<yourusername>\Documents\Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 2013\WorkItem Tracking\TypeDefinitions\CodeReviewResponse.xml"

4. Run the following command to export the work item types categories:

   witadmin exportcategories /collection:<yourcollectionurl> /p:<yourprojectname> /f:"c:\Users\<yourusername>\Documents\categories.xml"

5. Open the categories.xml file in notepad (or any other text editor). The file may look like this:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
   <cat:CATEGORIES xmlns:cat="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2008/workitemtracking/categories" />

   Modify the file to add the following categories:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
   <cat:CATEGORIES xmlns:cat="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2008/workitemtracking/categories">
     <CATEGORY name="Code Review Request Category" refname="Microsoft.CodeReviewRequestCategory">  
       <DEFAULTWORKITEMTYPE name="Code Review Request" />  
     </CATEGORY>
     <CATEGORY name="Code Review Response Category" refname="Microsoft.CodeReviewResponseCategory">  
       <DEFAULTWORKITEMTYPE name="Code Review Response" />  
     </CATEGORY>
     <CATEGORY name="Hidden Types Category" refname="Microsoft.HiddenCategory">  
        <DEFAULTWORKITEMTYPE name="Code Review Request" />  
        <WORKITEMTYPE name="Code Review Response" />  
     </CATEGORY>  
   </cat:CATEGORIES>

6. Run the following command to import the work item types categories from the file you just modified:

   witadmin importcategories /collection:<yourcollectionurl> /p:<yourprojectname> /f:"c:\Users\<yourusername>\Documents\categories.xml"

If you check your projects features in the administrative panel, the code review features should be enabled.

If you open the My Work panel in the Team Explorer there error you previously got should be gone and you can start using the code review functionality.

Here is a list of articles you might want to read for further information:

• Configure features after an upgrade
• Add updates to team projects manually
• witAdmin: Customize and manage objects for tracking work
• Code review and feedback field reference
• Import and export categories
• Categories XML element reference