Elevate Your Visual Studio TODOs

I recently had an instance when making a hot fix where I left some unintended code behind.   This is a constant worry of mine – trying to not forget to remove a temporary value during a quick true-up, or maybe a clearing a change only meant locally, deleting tweaks never meant to be committed.  I tried diligently setting up TODOs, but with large solutions, it became impossible to discern between future todos and immediate todos.

The Fix: Warn About TODOs Extension

Visual Studio Extension: Warn About TODOs

Luckily, I found a Visual Studio tool for this:  Warn About TODOs. This handy extension lets you flag your TODOs with varying degrees of severity and puts each in your error list, making them harder to miss.

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Using Microsoft Flow to Sync BaseCamp & VSTS (To-Do to Tasks)

We’ve strugged for years to get various departments to adapt, and stick to, a project management system. In the past year, have finally had some success with BaseCamp, as it has proved to be user-friendly enough that more and more departments began to use it. We suddenly needed to adapt to our users. We needed to make Visual Studio Team Services work with BaseCamp.

Make BaseCamp To-Do a VSTS Task

Creating a solution for BaseCamp to VSTS actually proved to be easy enough. I setup a project in BaseCamp and then a “Main To-Do List”. The only challenge in this is I needed to pass the BaseCamp To-Do Id so that when I closed my VSTS task (work item), it could link back to BaseCamp. For this, I chose to put the dynamic info in the “tags” field of my VSTS flow. Here’s the setup:

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