How Can I Connect Visual Studio 2008 to Team Foundation Service and Visual Studio Online?

Question

I've made sure that I have all of the prerequisites covered, then tried to install the patch from here:

• Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Compatibility GDR for Visual Studio 2012 Team Foundation Server and Team Foundation Service Preview

When I do so, I end up with this message:

OK - so, believing that perhaps I have already installed software which covers the update I try to add my TFS preview server to Visual Studio 2008 Team Explorer (with settings that match what I have in VS 2012):

This tries to connect for maybe 30 - 60 seconds and then quits with this error message:

What am I doing wrong? From reading other blog posts it appears that Team Foundation Service is supported in both VS 2010 and VS 2008.

Answer 1

Visual Studio 2010 introduced the concept of a Project Collection, so the hierarchy looks like:

Server - Project Collection A - Project A
                              - Project B
       - Project Collection B - Project C
                              - Project D
                              - Project E

In TFS 2005 and 2008 the Project Collection didn't exist, so the hierarchy looked like this:

Server - Project A
       - Project B
       - Project C

Due to this change you need to point Visual Studio 2008 and 2005 to a project collection and not to the server. They think each ProjectCollection is its own server.

So, when connecting from an old version of Visual Studio to a 2010 or newer version of TFS, you need to use the projectcollection uri in the connect to server window, something along these lines:

https://yourtfsname.visualstudio.com/DefaultCollection/ http://yourtfsname.yourdomain.com:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection/

In order for Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 to connect, you also need to ensure that the proper forward compatibility patches are installed. This blog post covers all versions of Visual Studio and Team Foundation server and lists exactly which patches you need to install and in which order to install them (order is important!).

The version of Visual Studio, TFS and Windows influence the exact set of files to install, they're all listed in the blogpost mentioned.