Monday 19 October 2009

Team Explorer not showing the correct workspace

Today a fellow in our project team experienced a rather strange problem while working with Team Explorer. I spent some time on it to resolve it so thought to share it out here to save someone else's precious time.

The problem we faced was that this person's team explorer was showing someone else's workspaces rather than his own.

I verified the person's credentials and his access rights on team project. Then I used TFS Sidekicks to see his workspaces and all his workspaces were still present on the server. Then I typed tf workspaces on his client machine using Visual studio command prompt and I could still see his original workspaces all right. So, why is it different when connecting from visual studio? I double checked to see if he was not executing visual studio's exe from any other account but he was not.

Finally, I checked that whether he had some saved User credentials for connection to the TFS server and ahaaa that resolves our problem! There was a saved user credential for connection to the TFS server and by default TFS explorer was using this credential rather than the credential our user was logged in as. Removed that stored credential and we got correct workspaces.

Please note that the way we are set up is that developer’s machine resides on a different domain than TFS. Each developer connects to the TFS machine by connecting to the TFS's domain using VPN, where each developer has his/her own credential. The TFS server is added in each development machine's host file. So, when connecting, Windows uses host file and stored credential information rather than the VPN user name.