When I copy/paste a formatted text, it does keep its formatting. But when I save the item, the formatting goes and all I can see is just a plain text.

Another point is that it is not practical to enter the description in another program and then copy/paste it to the Team Explorer. Ideally I'd like to have formatting capabilities inside Visual Studio.

It depends on how the work item type is defined. Some types define Description field as HTML field, other may define it as Plain Text. The same kind of control is used for both, but Plain Text field will strip formatting out when saved.

You can turn on "formatting" toolbar. Just right click on toolbar area, and choose Formatting toolbar to be shown. It allows to hilight text, choose fonts, colors, etc.

The Description field has type of Long text. And the MSDN in http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms243027.aspx states:

To improve readability, Team Foundation allows you to do simple text formatting in some long text boxes. The text boxes that support text formatting may vary, depending on your work item types.

I tried Description field in Scenario, Task and Bug item types. None of them allow formatting. The formatting toolbar remains disabled. Sad.

Hey there,

The Long Text datatype was a pre-release datatype that is no longer present. The RTM version (and probably even Beta3) supports only PlainText and HTML.

The System.Description field is the one that is mapped to the 'Description' text box in the Agile work item types. The data type is 'PlainText' out of the box. Since it is a core field, it cannot be changed to HTML, unfortunately. Your option here is to create a new field of type HTML and use the same (or another) text box to modify its value. This is a viable option if you have just begun to use this project and don't already have a bunch of work items which have the description filled in.

Hope this helps.

Karthik

Any good articles on how exactly to add this field in an existing Team project?

Thanks,

JGP