Displaying Wiki Documents Within TFS

Description:

To date, all companies that we've worked with were using a wiki to assist them with their project management needs. Wikis are easy to use and provide a very flexible way of organizing project requirements, use cases, and other project information. Wikis are primarily focused on unstructured, free-form pages of information, but some wikis also allow structured database information to be managed from within the wiki.

While companies use wikis in a variety of different ways, there are still some common threads that we've seen in the clients we've worked with.

One common thread that we've seen is that companies put information into their wikis, and then want the ability to link some of these wiki documents with specific work items that are tracked separately in TFS. When they are viewing these work items in TFS, they want the ability to view the related documents that are stored in the wiki.

Solution:

The TFS desktop client, Team Explorer, supports the ability to load custom controls. We wrote a web viewer custom control that was positioned within the work item's tab forms. The user could then enter an URL that corresponding to the related document in the wiki. When viewing the work item from within TFS, the user could read the related document.