Visual Studio TFS Workspace Mapping Question

Question

We use Azure DevOps for TFS here. This developer is receiving an upgraded workstation and is trying to setup her workspaces in visual studio. When she attempts to create a workspace on her new workstation she receives the error "The workspace XYZ already exists on computer OLD-PC".

I know I can do some hacky visual studio command prompt stuff to delete the old workspace mappings on the TFS server, but I was hoping to understand the error a bit better. Is she receiving this error because TFS workspaces mapped to a project must be unique in name? I was a bit confused why it would be giving an error for a workspace already existing on a different PC, I thought it would identify by the new PC name and workspace name and not cause an issue.

Any insight or general guidance on workspace mapping conflicts would be appreciated. I need to learn a bit more about how this works.

Thanks in advance!!!

Answer 1

Customer will encounter this error ‘workspace xyz already exists on computer abc’ when trying to create a new local workspace while the old workspace persists. And testing in my side and found that TFS workspaces mapped to a project must be unique in name.

To resolve this issue, you could rename your new workspace or use the tf workspace command to delete other's old workspace. Make sure you have own manage other users workspace permission. Otherwise, you need to get your TFS administrator to delete the workspace if you have no access to the account. Just using below command.

tf workspace /delete "WORKSPACENAME;PREVIOUSUSERACCOUNT"

See: Visual studio alerts workspace already exists for more details.