I'm not positive that this just isn't a failure to configure something correctly on my end, but thought I'd check to see if anyone had advice or suggestions.

My company is using a customized template within TFS, modified from MSF for Agile to include some additional product-specific fields.

Unfortunately, when using the Send Email feature, although the title, assigned to, created by and Work Item links are being created successfully, the description isn't populating, although viewing the work item in TFS does display the description.

On an unrelated note, I'm seeing divergent results when running queries from Team Look's Query Manager and from Team Explorer in TFS- one team query for which I've verified the queries match shows 505 results in TFS, but 806 from Query Manager. Any idea where the additional returns might be coming from?

Thanks,

Vanya

Vanya,

You mention two distinctly different issues in this thread. I'll do my best to answer your questions and help figure out what is happening.

1 - Discription isn't displaying on "Send Email" click.
I have not heard of this error before, however, it may be because you are using a customized template for your project.  Do you know if your customized type has a "new" description field in place of the old one?  If so, it may not have mapped the default Description to this new field (or changed field) in your template.  This would probably cause the description to not display correctly when creating an email from a Work Item.

2 - There is a known issue with the WorkItemStore objects not being refreshed properly in the TFS object model if they have different instances in different processes.  If you have both TeamLook (Outlook) running and Visual Studio, and make a change to one of the queries (even if you save the query to the server), running the same query in the other process will be running the "old" query string.  Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to refresh a single query from the server,  through the TFS object model, it will only get the refresh from the local WorkItemStore which is stale at that point. 
- If you want to refresh the Query Manager, you will need to close QM, and reopen it (yes annoying I know). 
- If you want to refresh Visual Studio, you need to click on the root project in the Team Explorer menu, then click refresh (clicking refresh anywhere else will not cause the entire store to be refreshed which is what is needed).

Is this possibly related to why you are getting different results?  Do you still get different results if you close both applications and restart them?  I am guessing you just have a stale Work Item Store in one of the processes.

Cheers,
~Joe

Wow. I'm amazed with the speed of response.

I'm not overly concerned, actually, with the second issue- I'll try restarting both and see what results. I'm going to poke around and see if I can figure out if the description field is indeed a mapping issue, but that sounds as if it may be the case. I vaguely recall some discussion about modifying the field to rich text so that HTML could be used in it (and this seems to be verifiable by checking the output, which shows Rich Text Description in Other Fields). Will there at some point be an SDK for those who have customized templates or is there a setting somewhere where we'll be able to tweak the mappings?

Thanks,

Vanya

Vanya,

There are/were plans to make creation of the email from the Work Item very customizable.  Unfortunately, this feature did not make it into v1.5 of TeamLook.  We depend on the default Description field being mapped to the appropriate 'real' field so that we actually get the correct values.  At some point in the future, we hope to have the ability to allow the end user to create the emails how they want based on their customized templates.

As an aside, where did you get your customized Agile project?  Was this something that you came up with yourself, or was this something you downloaded?  I would be interested to try this out and see how we can come up with a way around your problem.

Cheers,
~Joe