The code example at the end of this post shows how a connection is made to a Team Foundation Server (with the right credentials). After that the WorkItemStore is initialized, which we can use to create a Project object.

[csharp] Project tfsProject = workItemStore.Projects["Test"];
[/csharp]

On the line above you see how a Project object is created, the Test mentioned above is a currently existing TFS Project.

When a Project object is successfully made, we can use that to create a so-called WorkItemType. In this example we are going to be creating a task type. You can create a couple of different WorkItems, those are supplied by the TFS installation. It is also possible to create custom workitem types within TFS.

When the WorkItemType is created, we can use that to create a new object of the type WorkItem. This object has loads of different properties and methods. A lot of those properties are names of fields in TFS from the standard workitem template.

Here we fill 2 standard fields, Title and Description. Yes, it’s easy like that .

Because at my work we use a couple of custom fields in our template, we also need to be able to store data in there with our function. Well as you can see here I store A different description in a custom field with the reference name custom.comment

The validate method of the workitem creates an ArrayList which contains the names of fields that do not match the template’s requirements. When the .Count of the ArrayList is 0, all is OK.

Save our workitem to TFS. That’s it, more isn’t to it. Well I posted the full source below and I also attached the project I used so you can download it.
[csharp] using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Collections;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client;
using Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client;
using System.Net;

namespace Example_AddTFSWorkitem
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
NetworkCredential teamFoundationCredential = new NetworkCredential(“TeamFoundationUsername”, “TeamFoundationPassword”);
TeamFoundationServer tfsServer = new TeamFoundationServer(“http://tf-server:8080″, teamFoundationCredential);
tfsServer.EnsureAuthenticated();
WorkItemStore workItemStore = (WorkItemStore)tfsServer.GetService(typeof(WorkItemStore));
Project tfsProject = workItemStore.Projects["Test"];

WorkItemType wiType = tfsProject.WorkItemTypes["task"];
WorkItem workItem = new WorkItem(wiType);

workItem.Title = “Normal workitem title”;
workItem.Description = “The normal description”;

// custom.comment is a custom field added to the ‘task’ template from from the ‘Test’ project
workItem.Fields["custom.comment"].Value = “A different description!”;

ArrayList invalidFields = workItem.Validate();
if (invalidFields.Count > 0)
{
StringBuilder invalidFieldString = new StringBuilder();

for (int count = 0; count < invalidFields.Count; count++)
{
Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.Field test = invalidFields[count] as Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.Field;
invalidFieldString.AppendLine(test.Name + " has an invalid value (" + test.Value + ")");
}
// invalidFieldString StringBuilder now contains a list of fields not valid for your template
return;
}
else
{
workItem.Save();
return;
}
}
}
}
[/csharp]