SharpStyle Labs

Screenshots are an important part of documenting bugs and feature requests. Visual Studio 2005 out-of-the box functionality requires you to take a screenshot, save it and then add to a work item.

Here is a better way: jmanning posted an Add-In that makes this a lot easier. You can find source files here.

This Visual Studio Add-in allows “pasting” items (images, text, files) from the clipboard as attachments to Team Foundation work items.

Here are instructions and compiled add-in:

• Download PasteIntoWorkItem.zip
• Unzip into %My Documents%/Visual Studio 2005/AddIns
• Now when you open Visual Studio 2005 you should see “PasteIntoWorkItem” menu item under Tools

• Once you choose that menu item, you will see a window that allows you to provide comments
• Add-In can handle the following clipboard content
• One or more files 
• Image, PrintScreen, etc 
• Text

A few limitations:

• Text is pasted without formatting as “txt” file
• Mixed text and image are not supported — in case that you want to copy from Microsoft Word document that contains both text and images

A few other items:

• You can customize Visual Studio to have a keyboard shortcut for PasteIntoWorkItem
• There are a number of screen capture tools, but the following workflow works for me in most cases:
  • PrtScn or Alt+PrtScn
  • If I only need a part of the screen capture: open MSPaint (it is either “pinned” to my Start Menu or sits in Quick Launch) and copy only the part you need 
  • PasteIntoWorkItem

~Mike