Too many users in the ”assigned to” list for a team project?

Last week I lectured a class on Team System. One of the labs we worked on involves setting up permissions for your team foundation project. During the lab one of my students did not find the just assigned users in the dropdown box to assign work item to. That triggered me to get into more details on what kind of permissions I would exactly need to get assigned to a group that can be assigned a work item. I just exported the Methodology template using the template export functionality of team system. I examined the work item type definition of a bug and found that the field “assigned to” is allowed the values of anything that qualifies as <VALIDUSERS>.

So that did not give me the answer. I went trough the documentation you can find in the extensibility kit that Microsoft provides as a separate download for Team system. In the documentation I found that <VALIDUSERS> stands for everyone in the TFSEveryone group. But this gets me worried. Because everyone administered in the Team Foundation Server will be a member of the TFSEveryone group. This would mean that when I am working at a company that has e.g. 100 developers working on the same team foundation server (and this is feasible because TFS is targeted to at least 500 developers) this would mean I need to select my favorite developer from a list of 100 people! This does not seem right. So I filed a bug report on this, and hope they will make a containing only the contributors of a specific project. This way I can assign my work items only to the people who are working in my project. That would make a lot more sense in my opinion. If you agree on my oppinion on this. Please vote for this bug report in the Feedback center. This will make the team more responsive to the issue.

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