Microsoft Project and Team Foundation Integration Tip

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I’m trying to sync a mpp file with a few thousand rows.  I haven’t made assignments for everything yet, so I just want to sync a few rows.  There is some help in the documentation, if you remember a few nuances:

There’s a sweet article called “How to: Enable or Disable Publishing of Work Items in Microsoft Project”. To choose the rows that don’t get synced, you have to set the “Publish and Refresh” field to “No”. The add-in assumes “yes” by default.  Also, you need to set that for everything.

  1. Switch to the “Team System Task Sheet” view under the “View” menu.  This is after you’ve associated the project plan with a team project.
  2. Select the title column, highlighting all tasks and subtasks
  3. Hit “+” on the formatting toolbar or use the “ALT-SHIFT-+” key combination to expand all tasks and subtasks
  4. The CTRL-END key combination will take you to the last “Publish and Refresh” field on the screen (at least, it did for me). Set it to “no”, and drag it up to the top row.  That will set all rows not to publish.
  5. Now, you can just change the “Publish and Refresh” values on the rows you’d like to sync to “yes” when you’re ready to sync them.

If you need to refresh data from the server, just close the project plan and reopen it.  Refresh (on the Team System MS Project Toolbar) will also help, but some fields will only update when the file opens again (like any new users you’ve added, or new fields you’re mapping in the MS Project column mapping settings).