In my consulting role, I am coming across more organisations starting to take advantage of VSTS and Team Foundation Server. Today I had a situation arise where I was asked what does this mean “TF30321: The name you typed is already used for another team project on the Team Foundation Server.”  While the meaning is actually quite self evident, the user was adamant they had not tried to create a team project with that name before. They even opened Team Explorer and confirmed that there was not a team project already created with that name.

[I have seen this error before but usually only on my test TFS installations and I have had the luxury of just throwing a “2” or “3” on the project name and moving forward ]

This problem can occur when people try to create a team project and the creation fails for some reason. The wizard is often not able to roll things back cleanly and you end up with an inconsistent team project that does not appear on the team explorer list. This then prevents a project with that name being created in the future on that server.

One of the best ways to get a complete list of all team projects, including those that have failed and may not appear in the team explorer is to follow the advice of James Manning in this blog entry. A quick run of his ListTeamProjects utility showed a handful of projects with the dreaded [New] status. Now I’m off to see how I fair with “TfsDeleteProject /force xyz”.