Troubleshooting Team Foundation Server Management

  • Article

Team Foundation Server management includes adding and managing users and groups in Team Foundation Server, managing Team Foundation Server permissions, managing permissions between Team Foundation Server, SharePoint Products and Technologies, and SQL Server Reporting Services, and managing Team Foundation Server in its workgroup or domain environment. This topic describes some of the most common management problems and their solutions.

If you cannot resolve a problem after reviewing these tips, see the Microsoft Technical Forums for Visual Studio Team System Team Foundation Server. These forums provide threads that you can search for information about a variety of troubleshooting topics, and the forums are monitored to provide quick responses to your questions.

  • Users Cannot Access Team Project Portal

  • Users Cannot Access Reports

  • Cannot Add a User or Group

  • Added User or Group Does Not Appear in Team Foundation Server

  • Added User or Group Cannot Access Team Foundation Server

  • Changed Permissions for a User or Group Do Not Appear to be Working in Team Foundation Server

  • Changed Membership for a Team Foundation Server Group Does Not Take Effect Immediately

  • Missing Subject Line in E-mail Notification Alerts

Troubleshooting Management Problems

When you are trying to troubleshoot user, group, permission, and environment-specific problems in Team Foundation Server, check event log messages for errors. You can view event logs by clicking Start, clicking Administrative Tools, and then clicking Event Viewer. Team Foundation Server events are written to the Application event log, and additional information about each event can be viewed by double-clicking individual events. Active Directory and local system events are written to the Security event log, and service account and services events are written to the System event log.

If you experience significant performance delays, you should first check to make sure your Team Foundation Server hardware and software meets minimum requirements, and then check performance counters. For more information about checking performance counters, see How to: View Team Foundation Server Performance Counters.

Users Cannot Access Team Project Portal

Symptom:   An error appears when you try to access the team project portal.

Possible Causes:

  • You might have manually typed the project portal URL and made a mistake. In Team Explorer, right-click the project, and then click Show Project Portal.

  • Internet Information Services (IIS) might be stopped on the application-tier server for Team Foundation. To verify whether IIS is running, on the application-tier server, click Start, click Administrative Tools, click Internet Information Services, and verify whether the service is stopped. For more information, see How to: Stop and Start Services, Application Pools, and Web Sites.

  • The Microsoft Team Foundation Server Application Pool might be stopped. Open Internet Information Services Manager, and verify that the application pool is running.

  • You might not have appropriate permissions in SharePoint Products and Technologies. When you add users or groups to Team Foundation Server, you must also add them to SharePoint Products and Technologies and SQL Server Reporting Services. For more information, see Managing Permissions.

  • You are using the version of Team Explorer that is included with Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server. There is a known issue with the original version of Team Explorer and Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server when Team Foundation Server is configured to use Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. You can obtain an update from Microsoft or upgrade Team Explorer to Visual Studio Team System 2008. For more information, see Version Compatibility for Team Explorer and Version Compatibility for Team Foundation Server.

Users Cannot Access Reports

Symptom:   An error appears when you try to open or access reports in Team Explorer.

Possible Causes:

  • You might not have appropriate permissions in SQL Server Reporting Services. When you add users or groups to Team Foundation Server, you must also add them to SharePoint Products and Technologies and Reporting Services. For more information, see Managing Permissions and Troubleshooting Team Foundation Reporting.

  • IIS might be stopped on the application-tier server for Team Foundation. To verify whether IIS is running, on the application-tier server, click Start, click Administrative Tools, click Internet Information Services, and verify whether the service is stopped. For more information, see How to: Stop and Start Services, Application Pools, and Web Sites.

    Note

    For deployments that use SQL Server 2008, Reporting Services operates independently of IIS.

  • The application pool for Reporting Services might be stopped in IIS. In IIS, verify that this application pool is running.

Cannot Add a User or Group to Team Foundation Server

Symptom:   A domain user or group does not appear in the Windows User or Group dialog box.

Possible Causes:

Added User or Group Does Not Appear in Team Foundation Server

Symptom:   A recently added user or group does not appear in the server or project to which you just added them.

Possible Causes:

  • You must set at least one permission to Allow or Deny in order to successfully add a user or group to Team Foundation Server. If you add a user or group but do not set at least one permission to Allow or Deny (leave all permissions unset), that user or group will not be added to Team Foundation Server. There will be no error message or warning. For more information, see Managing Users and Groups and Team Foundation Server Permissions.

Added User or Group Cannot Access Team Foundation Server

Symptom:   A recently added user or group cannot access Team Foundation Server work items, source code, project portals, or reports.

Note

Consider adding users and groups to Team Foundation Server groups instead of to the project or the server. For more information, see Managing Users and Groups.

Possible Causes:

  • In environments where there is more than one Team Foundation Server, the user might be trying to access a Team Foundation Server where they do not have permissions on any project. Make sure that the user is accessing the correct Team Foundation Server for the project.

  • The user or group might belong to a different domain or workgroup without the necessary trust relationship to access Team Foundation Server. For more information, see Managing Team Foundation Server in an Active Directory Domain and Managing Team Foundation Server in a Workgroup.

  • You added a user or group that has only the Administer Shelvesets permission set to Allow or Deny. There is a known issue with this permission in that if you add a user or group that has only this permission set to Allow, the user or group is not added correctly to the Team Foundation Valid Users group, and therefore cannot access the Team Foundation Server. Check to see whether the user or group appears in the list of Team Foundation Valid Users members, and make sure that when you add users or groups, you add them with more than the Administer Shelvesets permission actively set to Allow or Deny. For more information, see Managing Users and Groups, How to: View Existing Users, and Team Foundation Server Permissions.

  • You might not have appropriate permissions in SharePoint Products and Technologies or SQL Server Reporting Services. When you are adding users or groups to Team Foundation Server, you must also add them to SharePoint Products and Technologies and Reporting Services. For more information, see Managing Permissions.

  • For source control issues, a user or group might be using a Team Foundation Server proxy that has not been correctly configured. If you have made any changes to your Team Foundation Server proxy or the service account for the Team Foundation Server proxy, you must configure both the proxy and the server to reflect these changes. For more information, see How to: Configure Cache Security for Team Foundation Server Proxy, Team Foundation Server Security Architecture, and Troubleshooting Team Foundation Server Proxy.

Changed Permissions for a User or Group Do Not Appear to be Working in Team Foundation Server

Symptom:   An existing user or group needs its permissions changed. Immediately after changing the permission, the user or group's functionality appears to be identical to before the permission change.

Possible Causes:

Changed Membership for a Team Foundation Server Group Does Not Take Effect Immediately

Symptom:   An administrator adds or removes a user from a Team Foundation Server group. Immediately after they are added or removed from that group, that user does not appear to have been affected by that change in group membership.

Possible Causes:

  • Changes to group membership can take a minute or two to synchronize across Team Foundation Server. This problem is especially likely to occur if there is significant network latency between the data-tier and application-tier servers for Team Foundation. Also, synchronization can take longer when Active Directory security groups are being used between Team Foundation Server and the domain controller or controllers where the security group resides.

    • Wait several minutes, and try the action again.

    • In Active Directory deployments, you can use the gpupdate command-line tool with the /force parameter to force updates to Active Directory security groups.

    • If you use Active Directory security groups and regularly make membership changes to these groups, you can configure Team Foundation Server to synchronize more frequently with Active Directory. By default, Active Directory synchronization occurs hourly. You can increase this frequency by changing the web.config file and adding an appSettings key in the IdenityUpdatePeriod section. Set the value for appSettings to the frequency you want. The default is one hour, 1:0:0.

    • For more information, see "gpupdate" on the Microsoft Web site, How to: Change Configuration Settings for Team Foundation Server Components, Team Foundation Server Permissions, and Team Foundation Server Security Architecture.

Missing Subject Line in E-mail Notification Alerts

Symptom:   Subject line in e-mail alerts is blank.

Possible Causes:

  • The following three assemblies are not loaded.

    • Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Server.EventFilter.dll

    • Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Server.EventFilter.dll

    • Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.WorkItemTracking.Server.EventFilter.dll

    The Team Foundation Server Services Web application loads these assemblies when it starts. These assemblies do not load when the ASP.NET configuration settings for the Web service have been changed using Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager. This approach causes an attribute to be added to the configuration element of the corresponding Web.Config file.

    For example, before a configuration is changed, the Services Web.Config file contains the following entries:

    <configuration>
<!-- Team Foundation/Web application values -->
</configuration>

    After a configuration is changed using IIS Manager, the Services Web.Config file contains the following entries:

    <configuration xmlns="https://schemas.microsoft.com/.NetConfiguration/v2.0">
<!-- settings -->
</configuration>

    To correct the problem, use an editor or Notepad to remove the namespace attribute. You do not need to run iisreset after this change.

    For more information about configuring e-mail notification, see How to: Configure SMTP Server and E-mail Notification Settings in the Services Web.Config File.

See Also

Tasks

Troubleshooting Team Foundation Server Permissions and Security

Troubleshooting Team Foundation Server Performance Counters

Troubleshooting Team Foundation Server Command-Line Tools

Troubleshooting Team Foundation Server Proxy

Troubleshooting the New Team Project Wizard

Troubleshooting Team Foundation Reporting

Concepts

Troubleshooting the Data Warehouse