New Visual Studio Team Services Time Tracker

I work with Visual Studio Team Services a lot as a freelancer. Some of my clients demand that I send time reports on tasks which I did during the day. I was looking for a simple solution to fulfill their requests and found it.

I want to show you a tool which will make you more productive in Visual Studio Team Services when it comes to task and project time tracking. I think TMetric (tool's name) will be useful for all developers who work mainly in Visual Studio Team Services and are looking for a reliable, free and simple time tracker.

Now, I want to show you how to track your work time on tasks in Visual Studio Team Services.

Preparing to track your work time in Visual Studio Team Services

For a proper time tracking in VS you need to create a TMetric account. It will take a minute maximum.

Here is the registration link - Create TMetric account

After successful registration and browsing through the interface, which is as simple as it can be, you need to install a browser plugin,

• TMetric Chrome extension
• TMetric Firefox add-on

Now when you are all set, you can proceed to track work time in Visual Studio Team Services.

Tracking time in Visual Studio Online. How it works

Before explaining how it works, it is assumed that you already have an account in Visual Studio Team Services and created a project in it.

When you create or open a task in Visual Studio Team Services, you will see the TMetric Start timer button as shown in the screenshot below.



Click the button, and TMetric will start recording your Visual Studio Online working time. Notice that the Start timer button changes to the Stop timer button and displays the time you spent on the issue.

If you have the status of Owner or Admin when first starting the timer for the issue, TMetric pulls out from Visual Studio Online the project name of the issue and automatically creates a project with the same name in your TMetric account.

The issue appears on the Tracker page in the TMetric web app. The name, ID, and project of the issue are the same as in Visual Studio Online.

You can easily navigate back to Visual Studio Online by clicking the issue ID (in our case ID is #10).