Since the beginning of TFS (Team Foundation Server), Microsoft has been providing integrations for Microsoft Office products like MS Excel or MS Project but not for MS Word. WordToTFS has been created to fill this gap. Work items can be created and edited in MS Word and bidirectionally synced between TFS or Azure DevOps (Services and Server) and MS Word. In addition to exporting and authoring work items, WordToTFS also supports generating test specifications and test result reports. More information about the functionality is available on the website.
Install the following
Additional
Build or Run TFS.SyncService.View.Word project. The View.Word project is a COM plugin for Word. When you run the solution with Visual Studio, Word will be opened and WordToTFS is directly loaded as COM-plugin.
The project contains unit and integration tests. Integration tests require a running Azure DevOps Server instance. For local testing, the Azure DevOps (Server) information must be provided in the Local.runsettings file. The tests are marked with an according test category:
The tests in the test category "Interactive", "Interactive2 and "PreparationNeeded" need already existing work items as predefined test data. This setup is needed, to have certain states of work items which are used within the tests. For that reason, we backed up a Project Collection containing those test data. This Project Collection is restored it in AITs test environment. Since cleanup of the backup collection is much effort, it is not yet part of this repository. A way of running these tests is an open point and may be shared in the future. The backup contains test plans with test work items which are used to make end-to-end-test for word-file creation based on a configured template. For example, this is needed in the class ConsoleExtensionHelperTest for testing the console behavior of WordToTFS. The file ConfigurationNew1.xml contains the name and test result configuration or test specification configuration with the name of the test plan and test suite that will be used. Please skip and ignore these tests currently. Somebody of the community might also work out a better test data management to automatically create the test data without using a backed up database.
As a centralized build system Azure DevOps Pipelines is used, because the previous builds were already using TFS-based build environments and all requirements could be fulfilled. The continuous integration build is shared as a yaml workflow in this repository, please check the azure-pipelines-ci.yml. To successfully run and configure the complete Azure DevOps Pipeline, a build environment with certain conditions and configurations must be set up.
The Pipeline needs the following variables configured:
The assemblies are strong named due to several restrictions using click once and office plugins. A dummy.snk file is being used in all project files to strong name the assemblies and prevent dll manipulation. For a publishing pipeline this publicly shared file should be replaced.
WordToTFS also needs to be signed via a certificate to successfully be used for publishing. For local development the current configuration of TFS.SyncService.View.Word_TemporaryKey.pfx can be used. This pfx must be replaced and the valid ManifestCertificateThumbprint used for publishing.
The full documation is currently only available on the website. The PDF contains detailed information about how to install, configure and use WordToTFS.
We love pull requests from everyone. Fork, then clone the repo:
git clone git@github.com:your-username/project-name.gitMake your change. Make sure to test your changes. Push to your fork and please do not forget to submit a pull request.
At this point you're waiting on us. We like to at least comment on pull requests. We may suggest some changes or improvements or alternatives.
Some things that will increase the quality of your pull request: