I had an interesting TFS problem present itself this morning. As a trainer/presenter I often go into the field to deliver presentations on VSTS and TFS and I have my laptop configured such that VS2005 is installed on the host OS and I have a full Team Foundation Server running in a virtual machine on my laptop as well. If and when I need to use TFS, I start up the virtual machine, connect to it and away I go.

This morning I wanted to point the VSTS client on the host back to a full TFS setup in my office to do some real coding .  I didn’t need my TFS on my virtual machine so I didn’t start it up. So here’s the problem. When I started Visual Studio Team Suite on my laptop and went to the “Connect to Team Foundation Server” option expecting to be able to add this new TFS server, I get a “Failed to find abt-tfsR3b” message and the “Connect to Team Foundation Server” dialog box fails to display. I poked around a bit to make sure I didn’t miss anything and became a bit perplexed because I have been able to configure a client with multiple TFS servers in the past.

I did a search on the MSDN Technical Forums and even checked on Google with no luck. Stuck for ideas I started the TFS server on my laptop in the VM and then tried the “Connect to Team Foundation Server” option and low and behold, the dialog box is displayed and I can now add a new TFS server to the client. Once added I can shutdown the VM TFS server and get to work. The problem with this is that you cannot change any TFS server settings if your registered TFS server is unavailable.

I visited the Microsoft Product Feedback center to see if this was a bug and there it was – reported last month. I knew I should have checked there first .  Microsoft’s reply is that this is being fixed in the release version so people might experience this bug between now and the expected release in Q1 next year.