One of the key weaknesses (in my opinion) with Team Foundation Server work items at present is the difficulty to record time spent against a project. Sure you can track time in the ‘Work Completed’ field and can even report on what changes were made to this field over time. The difficulty is that this still assumes that developers will always update the work items on the correct day and fails to give simple visibility of how much time different team members have spent on a given work item.

Some time back I created a small timesheet utility for Team Foundation Server 2010. This was partly driven out of a requirement to be able to track this level of detail for a project I was working on, but also to serve as a sample project for my previous blog posts about creating custom work item controls;

• TFS2010 Custom Work Item Controls Part 1
  
• TFS2010 Custom Work Item Controls Part 2

At the moment the code posted is far from perfect and I haven’t had a lot of time for updating the sample since the posts, but as a number of people have requested access to either view or contribute to the source code I’ve decided to post it to CodePlex ‘warts and all’ so to speak. If you are interested in the code for this component it can now be found at the following location.

• http://tfstimesheets.codeplex.com/

We’ve used this control on a couple of projects now and have found that it has helped to keep the work remaining / work completed values up to date by creating visibility of how much time team members are logging against work items on any given day. There are definitely some improvements that can be made (especially in terms of reporting) – so if you do happen to try out this component please drop me a note to let me know what you think, or if you have any ideas for how it could be improved!