I came across a problem today whereby a user had installed the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010 and was then unable to connect to their TFS 2010 server.

The error they were getting was “TF30335: The server name cannot contain the characters ‘/’ or ‘:’, or start with ‘http://’ or ‘https://’. If the server name is an IPV6 address, it can contain the character ‘:’ only if the full name is enclosed by square brackets.”

The most likely cause of this is the order in which the software has been installed. In my case the client had installed software in the following order.

1. Visual Studio 2008
   • Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1
     • Team Explorer 2008
       • Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010</ol> This means that the actual Team Explorer component has NOT been upgraded with SP1.

       To fix the problem, all we did was this.

       1. Uninstall the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010
          • Re-Apply Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (to patch the Team Explorer component)
            • Re-install the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010</ol>