VSTS (TFS Online): Create Work Item from Outlook Mail Integration via VSTO

Hi,

Well I believe this post is going to be fancy, but yet quite productive one.

In a team where the members are over-burdened with task, and yet they are asked to create TFS work-items for each relevant email which has the associated task for them. They kinda not happy with the effort and wish if there was a kind of integration available from outlook to TFS, and this is what this post outlines…

Well in this post I will demonstrate using the VSTO office add-in technique.

Here create a form based application for the users, which ask the meta data for the work item (whether its a big, severity, priority and more), then it extracts the active mail subject as title of the work-item , and the body of the mail as the body of the work item. And rest the below image can speak out loud its functionality:

1. This VSTO add-in created a button in the outlook home tool bar



2. Once the active email is selected in the outlook explorer, clicking on the above button will bring up the following screen, where one can select the necessary work item parameter



3. Then upon cliking the save and close button the applcication uses TFS code to create the neccesary work item in the portal and provides us with the ID of the newly created



4. Then this newly created work item can be verified in the portal, along with the necessary attachments in the email

The source code of the above is attached with this post for further digging in, and providing the necessary details.

OutlookTfsConnector

Note: The following configuration needs to be completed for the add-in to leverage the TFS user personal token

Authenticate access with personal access tokens for VSTS and TFS

And the application app.config needs to be edited for each user using the tool:

Hope the helps.