Break it, fix it

I recently decided, for a specific team project, to use the Description field instead of the Repro Steps field in the Bug work item. The main reason is to be able to create reports for both Product Backlog Items and Bugs, while being able to display the full description. The first step was to migrate the content of the Repro Steps field into the Description field in order to retain data for existing items. Since it is not possible to do field-to-field bulk update from the Web interface, I had to create a small console application to copy the data. The main problem I encountered was about inline images. When you copy and paste a screenshot into an HTML field, it creates an img tag with Base64 data in the src attribute. For an unknown reason, when the data in the src exceeds a certain limit (I don't know the actual value), the src attribute is blanked during the save. Images simply appear blank in the target field. After some search, I came across this post from René van Osnab...

If you need to create reports for TFS, most of the time it is much easier to create them by copying an existing report. As I need to do this frequently, I decided to create a template to minimize the amount of work. Here is a link to the TFS report template.

If you plan on upgrading your Release Management installation from update 1 to update 2, here is a bit of advice: Do not. I tried in our internal installation, and everything broke down. The worst part was the TFS integration. It was no longer possible to link a TFS build definition to a release template, rendering them completely useless. And since RM for TFS is all about release template, the whole release infrastructure was absolutely blocked. I will wait for the next update and hope Microsoft will fix these issues. As a side note, deploying a brand new Update 2 installation did not fix the TFS issues, so apparently it is not related to the upgrade process. EDIT (2014-08-22): I have upgraded to Update 3 without problem. It was probably a bug corrected in the last version.