If you are using Team Foundation Server with Visual Studio, it will be useful for you to integrate your projects bug system with the TFS Work Items system. You can write a simple module for your program which will handles the exceptions and collects needed information and send them to the TFS.

So how can we do something like that? First you have to write an error management module which will handles exceptions, errors, etc. and generates understandable information from them. After generating this information lastly you have to send this information to the TFS.

In addition to this it will be helpful if you create your error information title unique in some cases to check that is this bug already entered as a Work Item Bug or not? For example you can combine type of the exception and last stack frame(s) which this error occurred in.

Anyway let us write a simple code which will enter our error as Work Item Bug to the TFS by programmatically. The code is so simple; you can also find more complicated codes on the web.

const string USERNAME = "XXXX";
const string PASSWORD = "XXXX";
const string DOMAIN = "MyDomain";
const string TFS_SERVER = "http://mytfsserver:8080";
const string PROJECT = "LANCET";

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
 string title = Request.QueryString["Title"];
 string description = Request.QueryString["Description"];
 string email = Request.QueryString["Email"];
 string force = Request.QueryString["Force"];
 if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(force))
  force = "1";

 try
 {
  NetworkCredential account = new NetworkCredential(USER_NAME, PASSWORD, DOMAIN);
  TeamFoundationServer server = new TeamFoundationServer(TFS_SERVER, account);
  Project project = null;

  server.Authenticate();
  WorkItemStore store = new WorkItemStore(server);
  project = store.Projects[PROJECT];
  if (project == null)
   throw new Exception("Project could not found");
  string wiql = "SELECT [System.Id], [System.Title], [System.Description] " +
     "FROM WorkItems " +
     "WHERE [System.TeamProject] = '" + PROJECT + "' " +
     "AND [System.Title] = '" + title + "'";
   
  WorkItemCollection collection = store.Query(wiql);
  StringBuilder tmp = new StringBuilder();
  tmp.Append(title);
  if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(description))
  {
   tmp.Append("\r\n");
   tmp.Append("-----------------------------------------------------------------");
   tmp.AppendLine();
   tmp.AppendLine(description);
  }
  if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(email))
  {
   tmp.AppendLine();
   tmp.Append("-----------------------------------------------------------------");
   tmp.AppendLine();
   tmp.AppendLine(email);
  }
  if (collection.Count == 0 || force == "1")
  {
   WorkItem item = new WorkItem(project.WorkItemTypes["bug"]);
   item.Title = title;
   item.AreaPath = @"CPM\Inbox";
   item.State = "Active";
   item.Description = tmp.ToString();
   item.Save();
  }
  else
  {
   WorkItem item = collection[0];
   item.Open();
   item.State = "Active";
   item.History += "\r\n\r\n" + DateTime.Now.ToString() 
     + " ----------------------------------------------------\r\n" + tmp.ToString();
   item.Save();
  }
  Response.Write("SUCCESS - Bug successfully inserted to the TFS");
 }
 catch (Exception ex)
 {
  Response.Write("ERR-" + ex.Message);
 }
}

As you see here, first we try to connect to the TFS server with the given network credentials, then we search for the project which will own this bug. After that we are trying to search that is there any Work Item which has the same title (which is unique for us). If we find an existing entry than we re-activate that task and add a history to it. If we don’t find any entry for this title then we add a new Bug case for this. Actually as I said before the code is so simple, you can change it according to your necessity.

Finally we have to talk about one more thing. What if the machine which our program runs on and generates exception does not have any access privileges to the TFS server machine? Because of some security reasons you may don’t want to open your system. In this case you can use a Website to solve this problem. Create a local web page which takes needed information from Request and runs the code above. So you can call this web page from your program and everything will be worked fine.