In a previous company, using TFS 2010 exclusively through visual studio, we primarily span Work Items up and organised them into iterations. Which worked fine: big pieces of work were organised under user stories, smaller items as stand-alone Tasks and Bugs could be created and tracked with Work Items to test and fix underneath them.
With a different employer now, trying to implement Agile, and we're using TFS 2012 primarily through a web interface. As the only team member with previous Agile experience I naturally fell back on what I knew.
However, it seems that the TFS 2012 web interface requires everything to belong to a User Story. Otherwise it doesn't show in the backlog at all, although you can still find it in TFS and log time against it.
So two questions:
1) What advantage is there, process-wise to making every trivial 1-2 day bugfix or incremental update belong to a user story? It would seem much more flexible to allow different types of work items to stand alone if required to do so.
2) Is there any way to change the settings in the TFS web interface to permit other kinds of work items to exist as part of the backlog, without needing to be linked to a User Story?