Hello Ron,

"Activate Date" has separate meaning than what you want to accomplish.

If you used "MSF Agile" template to create the Team Project, It means it will have date-time when your Work Item last became "Active".

You will not be able to use this field to have "Start Date" of the task.

However you can use TFS "Start Date" and "Finish Date" mapped to MS Project "pjTaskStart" and "pjTaskFinish" to have tasks Start date and Finish Date based on the linking(Predecessor) of these task in MS Projects. So you will not need to delete or add any mapping.

The answer to your 3rd question is Yes. You can create a baseline project in MS Project, then connect to TFS, add additional field values, like Work Item type...etc and Publish your project.

Hope this helps,

Smitha

Thanks for the response. Do you know if Start Date in TFS refers to the date the task is entered or the date it is activated? If it is the date it is entered, it doesn't help me with what I am trying to do. I want to try to get actual data on when tasks were started and completed as compared to when they were planned.

Thanks,

Ron Lounsbury

Hello Ron,

The Start Date and Finish Date are Planned Start and Finished Date of the task.

If you need the date when the tasks were actually started and compelted, then you will need to use fields

"Created Date" and "Closed Date"

You can add the following elements to you mapping xml and uploaded it to the server.

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Smitha

If I understand your post, doing that will put the date the work item was created in as the actual start, what I want to do is have the date I tell the developer to start working on it as the actual start. Similarly, the actual finish I want to track is when QA has said that it is good to go which may not be the same as the closing date. Do you know if there are TFS fields I can use for this?

Thanks,

Ron L