Modifying the Template
Work item templates can be made fairly easily by modifying the associated XML files.
You can retrieve the files by going to the Team Menu, Team Foundation Server Settings Menu, and selecting Process Template Manager… menu item to display the Process Template Manager Dialog box shown below:
Select the process template you would like to modify and select “Download”. You are then prompted to select the directory where you want to download the files. The file structure of the template is shown below:
There is an xml file with the definition of each type of work item.
The work item definition files have sections for definition of the work item data, state workflow tracking, and descriptions for the fields where the data is stored.
You can use Visual Studio to edit the fields, layout, and workflow definition of each item. Or, you can work directly with the XML file.
Updating the template of an existing project
You can simply upload the revised template, using the same name or a different name to TFS using the Process Template Manager, but your changes will only show up for new Team Projects that use that template. This is typically not that useful of a feature, as one doesn’t create new Team projects very often. It is often better to import the template changes into an existing project. To do this, you can use the witimport command line utility.
The witimport command can be found in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE directory.
The command line arguments are pretty straight forward:
witimport /f filepath /t tfs /p teamproject [/v] [/e encodingname]
Details on this utility can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms253163.aspx
