A few catches on customising the new Work Item form

If you use Team Foundation Server 2017 you already know this:

The new form is brilliant: it makes a much better use of the screen space, with a better UX in general.

But what if you have forms that were already using customised fields and a specific arrangement of controls?

The answer is that Microsoft uses a best-effort transformation system to automatically migrate your old form to the new, but for some reason I found myself in this situation – these two tabs won’t migrate to the new layout.

The new customisation model is brilliant – everything is now much cleaner and easier to use. All you need to do is add what you want to the <WebLayout> tag:

You can see that you now have Page, Group, Section as containers for controls, making life actually much easier when it comes to customisation. In my case I added two new Pages with the relevant control in there:

Of course you can customise the display layout by using the LayoutMode attribute. All the documentation is available here.