How to show ID’s in TFS story’s and tasks

I remembered that I saw TFS boards where the ID’s where shown directly within the board and one didn’t need to open each work-item to get it’s ID. I need these numbers to mention them in my commit messages so the commits and the work-items get link automatically by TFS/VSTS. As it took me quite some time to find these settings again I decided to write them down.

First of all we are talking about these little numbers here:

In TFS 2015 Update 3 they are hidden on the cards by default. To switch them on click the little gray gear icon next to the view filters. Not the gear icon in the header!

Using this gear icon one can configure the current view – and only the current view. If you like to have the setting on other views (eg. backlog vs sprints) too, you need to do it again in the other view(s).

Now you get a cool relatively new dialog where you can “Show ID’s” and configure other options like style-/color-rules for your cards and add custom fields etc.

I have configured some color-rules on my board to show story’s and task marked with some of my tags with other colors. For example “blocked” work-items are rendered as red cards.

Now, go and pimp your boards!