MS Project and Work Items

If you are a project manager or know a project manager who is using Microsoft Project with Team Foundation Server to manage Work items you may have noticed that Start and Finish Dates only update in one direction. It seems that by default PublishOnly is set to True in the Field Mapping for MS Project for these fields, therefore if you have a schedule in Project and you publish it to the Team Foundation Server the work items will have the start and finish dates from project. However if you load up a project from the work items in your Team project the dates will not be reflected.

You can change this by downloading a mapping file, changing it and uploading it again. Use the command line utility TFSFieldMapping.exe to accompish this. Read this article to understand how to download and upload mapping information. 

The command is as simple as:
TFSFieldMapping download TeamFoundationServer TeamProject MappingFile.xml
TFSFieldMapping upload TeamFoundationServer TeamProject MappingFile.xml

After you have downloaded the Project Field Mapping information you can change the PublishOnly attribute to False and upload the file again.