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I've recently switched from Visual Studio 2013 to 2015 and converted all of my old projects. However, now I can't seem to find my user tasks anymore? There used to be a drop-down menu in the task list, but it looks like that's gone in the new version, unless I'm missing something.

Have user tasks been removed? If so, is there a way I can still retrieve them from my project?

Silverlan
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    I can confirm that Microsoft has deprecated User Tasks in Visual Studio 2015 because of very low end user usage. We believe most users have moved to using better mechanisms for task tracking than persisting in their SUO file. If you wish to extract your existing tasks created in earlier versions, you can open existing solutions in Visual Studio 2013 and copy paste into a task-tracking tool of your choice. Thanks. Mark Wilson-Thomas, Program Manager, Visual Studio Editor Team. – Mark Wilson-Thomas MSFT Aug 29 '15 at 01:28
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    Now that I know it's been deprecated I can stop going crazy looking for it. What I'd really like to see added is a free text filter on the description column. My colleagues and I tend to use our initials in TODO comments that we want to come back to and it would be nice to be able to filter the list to show only items with my initials in the description. – Steve Crane Oct 13 '15 at 15:07
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    For now I've found that Find in Files with the regular expression //.*[Tt][Oo][Dd][Oo].* [Ss][Jj]{0,1}[Cc][: ] does the trick nicely and I can still double click in the results to navigate to the line as I would in the task list. – Steve Crane Oct 13 '15 at 15:47
  • @MarkWilson-ThomasMSFT In that case the [documentation](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/txtwdysk(v=vs.140).aspx#Anchor_1) is not up-to-date. It still shows an example of the user tasks in VS2015. – jao Jan 14 '16 at 14:57
  • You are quite correct; we have a bug against the documentation and it should be updated soon. Sorry about that! – Mark Wilson-Thomas MSFT Jan 15 '16 at 17:09
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    Steve Crane: I assume from the description that it would help if we added a free text search box like the one in the error list to the task list? We're considering this for a future release. – Mark Wilson-Thomas MSFT Jan 15 '16 at 17:11
  • The documentation has now been corrected, see https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/txtwdysk.aspx#userTasks – Mark Wilson-Thomas MSFT Jan 19 '16 at 21:12
  • Has anyone found/made an extension that restores this functionality? – pushasha Jul 27 '16 at 14:27
  • The fact that in C++, it only shows tasks for opened files, makes it rather useless. The Task List was better than Bookmarks because it stuck with the line of code, but at least you can jump to a Bookmark even if the file is not open. That's the whole point. – Pierre Aug 09 '16 at 14:10

4 Answers4

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The documentation on MSDN has been updated with this paragraph:

The user task feature has been removed in Visual Studio 2015. When you open a solution which has user task data from Visual Studio 2013 and earlier in Visual Studio 2015, the user task data in your .suo file will not be affected, but the user tasks will not be displayed in the task list.

If you wish to continue to access and update your user task data, you should open the project in Visual Studio 2013 and copy the content of any user tasks into your preferred project management tool (such as Team Foundation Server).

Dai
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Checked with MSDN:

Using the Task List

It doesn't work for me either, but you likely have more practice with Visual Studio than I do...

Peter Mortensen
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AmishJohn81
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    Hm... It does say Visual Studio "2015" on that MSDN page, but the drop-down menu simply doesn't exist in my task list. I know it was there in 2013 and I'm pretty sure I didn't do anything differently... – Silverlan Jul 31 '15 at 18:17
  • Are you using the Dark theme? I've read that was an issue with the dropdown in previous versions... – AmishJohn81 Jul 31 '15 at 18:22
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    I was using the dark theme, yeah, but switching it to blue/light didn't fix it - the drop down menu is still missing. – Silverlan Jul 31 '15 at 19:14
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    Thanks for pointing out this error in our documentation for Visual Studio 2015. I can confirm that Microsoft has deprecated User Tasks in Visual Studio 2015 because of very low end user usage. We believe most users have moved to using better mechanisms for task tracking than persisting in their SUO file. If you wish to extract your existing tasks created in earlier versions, you can open existing solutions in Visual Studio 2013 and copy paste into a task-tracking tool of your choice. Thanks. Mark Wilson-Thomas, Program Manager, Visual Studio Editor Team. – Mark Wilson-Thomas MSFT Aug 29 '15 at 01:32
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    Thanks for the feedback, but the error in the documentation still exists. MSDN documentation showed the User Task should be there, so I've just lost about an hour trying to figure what was wrong until I found this answer. – jose Oct 11 '15 at 00:30
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    https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/txtwdysk.aspx#userTasks has now been corrected – Mark Wilson-Thomas MSFT Jan 19 '16 at 21:13
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I used my tool FeinCtrl and found that CreateUserTask command is defined in Visual Studio 2015. However, when I bound it to a keyboard shortcut, it didn't do anything.

The Same commands in Visual Studio 2013 adds an empty user task and, if TaskList is visible with User Tasks selected - places an input caret into that new task.

Peter Mortensen
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Vlad Feinstein
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I used the user tasks as well. A workaround I've found is using Ctrl+K, Ctrl+K to add a bookmark to that line and then renaming the bookmark inside the Bookmark window (Ctrl+K, Ctrl+W) to indicate the change I need to make later.

Xavier Guihot
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barthooper
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