It’s been a number of years since I worked with TFS. Now that I’m back in that world one of the things that has bitten me is that by default any tasks tied to a check-in are resolved by default. Automatically marking tasks as complete has left me scratching my head in bewilderment as I wondered why a task I’m actively working on was no longer listed under my tasks. I can see the utility of this behavior in some circumstances but I often make incremental check-ins as I work through more complex tasks so clearly I don’t want checking in my changes to automatically close the task.

Since relying on my memory to change the check-in action from Resolve to Associate clearly isn’t adequate here I looked for some way to change the default behavior. I found that there are two ways to achieve this, neither of which are obvious.

The first method is to remove the Microsoft.VSTS.Actions.Checkin action from the work item template. The other method applies only to the client machine but requires a registry edit. Neither option is particularly great but given that the first option requires you to have authorization to modify the template and applies to each user of the template, I opted for the second approach.

To disable the default resolution option you need to locate HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\TeamFoundation\SourceControl\Behavior\ResolveAsDefaultCheckinAction and change the ResolveAsDefaultCheckinAction value from True to False. After making the change, restart Visual Studio and the Associate should now be selected the next time you try adding a work item to the check-in.