Use Advanced search when TFS does not find text in work items

Alert: Editing the TFS Collection database is tricky and should be done with extreme care!!

Recently I migrated a whole bunch of work items from a StarTeam repository. To keep some of the initial history, I added a some summary in the description field of the work item.

This looked something like this:

• Originally Created On: 20-07-2009 10:13:21
• Created By: StarTeam Server Administrator
• ExternalReference: 123456
• Last Build Tested: 7.3.0.9
• Starteam ID: 17525

All worked great but then…When searching for the text “7.3.0.9” in Web Access my Query showed no results.

The query that was constructed looked impressive though. Obviously it splits on the “.” sign

When I tried to search including quotes (“7.3.0.9”), it did not show any results as well. Hmm.Frustrating.

After some digging and with help of some guys at Microsoft (thanks Grant, Ewald and Hakan!), I found interesting thing.

The search over the text and…