Is there workaround for when TFPT is "unable to determine the workspace" and refreshing the cache does not work?

Question

I'm having trouble getting TFPT.exe to work at all, even after trying to refresh the cached workspace settings per the usual advice on the internet. See below for a log representative of what I've tried and am seeing. Can anyone explain why "tf get" is able to detemine the workspace, but "tfpt annotate" fails?

C:\tfsproj> set tfptcmd="C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 Power Tools\TFPT.exe"
C:\tfsproj> set tfcmd="C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio   10.0\Common7\IDE\TF.exe"
C:\tfsproj> %tfcmd% workspaces /s:http://tfs:8080/tfs/Apps
Collection: tfs\Apps
Workspace Owner          Computer Comment
--------- -------------- -------- ---------------------------------------------
DAVID     David_Zarlengo DAVID

C:\tfsproj> %tfcmd% get /preview
C:\tfsproj\src\:
Replacing Readme.txt

C:\tfsproj> %tfptcmd% annotate src\Readme.txt
Unable to determine the workspace

When I edit the workspace in Visual Studio 2010, the "Working folders" grid contains 3 rows, one of which is "Active, $/Foo, C:\tfsproj", therefore, I assume the folder is mapped correctly.

cross-posted on Team Foundation Server – Power Tools & Add-ons

Answer 1

This suggestion from a similar discussion on MSDN forums helped me:

You need to make sure that you are running the commands from a mapped folder, you can run tf workfold to see if the current folder is mapped or not (i.e in your case run the commands from C:\Temp)

Answer 2

I had this same error and the problem was that when I ran tfpt from the command line it was resolving to the 2008 version of the power tools instead of the 2010 version.

Run tfpt with no arguments and in the help it dumps out, it tells you which version it is.

Answer 3

For those in vs2017: try firing up vs2015 (not 2017), make sure to connect to TFS server in vs2015, and then tfpt worked just fine.

But note: it sounds like the tf powertools commands are being integrated into the new tfs tooling, so tfpt is not really a thing in 2017. See Daniel Mann's answer here for more info and helpful links: tfpt.exe on Visual Studio 2017

Answer 4

After taking a fresh look at this, it turns out that 'C:\tfsproj' is a directory symbolic link to 'C:\some\nested\path'. Running the TFPT command from the nested path works as expected.

Interestingly, the TFS workspace was mapped to the nested path, so it is surprising that TF commands (e.g. tf get /preview) were able work correctly from the alias path.

I suspect that TFPT does not follow NTFS directory symbolic links correctly when determining the workspace.

Answer 5

As long as you are inside the working directory, tfpt annotate should work. If you are getting the message "Unable to determine the workspace" then it is a caching issue.

If, as you said, you ran tf workspaces /s:serverURL and it still doesn't resolve I would try creating a new workspace and testing it out there. If that works then something wrong with the workspace obviously and I would just delete it and use the new one. If both fail then of course there is a bigger problem but that is how I would approach it.