Visual Studio 2008: Can't connect to known good TFS 2010

Question

A freshly installed TFS 2010 is at http://serverX:8080/tfs.

A Windows 7 developer machine with VS 2008 Pro SP1 and the VS2008 Team Explorer (no SP). The TFS 2008 Service Pack 1 didn't work for me - "None of the products that are addressed by this software update are installed on this computer."

The developer machine is able to browse the TFS site at the above URL.

The Issue is around trying to add the TFS server into the Team Explorer window in Visual Studio 2008. Here's a screenshot showing the error:

unable to connect to this Team Foundation Server. Possible reasons for failure include: The Team Foundation Server name, port number or protocol is incorrect. The Team Foundation Server is offline. Password is expired or incorrect.

The TFS server is up and running properly. Firewall ports are open, and is accessible via the browser on the dev machine!!

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Question: how can you connect from VS 2008 Pro to a TFS 2010 server?

Resolution

Here's how I solved this problem:

Installations

install Visual Studio 2008
install VS 2008 Team Explorer as above.
re-install VS 2008 Service Pack 1
install the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 (VS90SP1-KB974558-x86.exe)

Config

when adding a TFS server to Team Explorer, you MUST specify the URL as such: http://[tfsserver]:[port]/[vdir]/[projectCollection]
in my case above, it was http://serverX:8080/tfs/AppDev-TestProject
you cannot simply add the TFS server name and have VS look for all Project Collections on the server. TFS 2010 has a new URL (by default) and VS 2008 doesn't recognize how to gather that list.

I have to say TFS errors are always so descriptive, you know immediately what's wrong! — Thomas Bonini
Thanks! I read the documentation, I added the "/tfS" but I did not realize that I also had to add "/tfs/tpc-name" until I read your post. /Gunnar — user350727
When you are dealing with forward compatability I would like to see anyone else do a better job ;) — MrHinsh - Martin Hinshelwood
Just a note that after installing VS 2008 SP1 you should install the post-SP1 hotfixes: stackoverflow.com/questions/2164792/visual-studio-2008-hotfixes — user423430
+1 Thanks!. If in doubt about the URL, get the URL from a working connected VS2010 . In my case it was http://servername:8080/DefaultCollection — StuartLC

Bert Bert · Accepted Answer · 2009-12-18T11:46:27

Check out this article 'Connecting VS2008 to any TFS2010 Project Collection'.

The only catch here is that the author didn't mention that you need to install/reinstall Service Pack 1 'Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (Installer)' for Visual Studio 2008 after installing Team Explorer 2008. This will take care of the invalid characters error message when trying to connect.

Visual Studio 2008: Can't connect to known good TFS 2010

3 Answers