Visual Studio 2019 cannot find binding info but VS 2015 is fine

Question

When I open a project in VS 2019 (or 2017) I get the message:

The solution you are opening is bound to source control on the following...Would you like to contact this server to try to enable source control integration.

I click Yes and receive:

The solution appears to be under source control, but its binding information cannot be found...

VS 2015 opens projects just fine. What is the deal?

Answer 1

To make sure the connection and workspace cache of your Team Explorer 2019 is populated, it needs to connect to the server at least once before it will know how to bind the solution to source control.

You can do this through the Connect to... option in Team Explorer.

If, as you described, that dialog is giving you lemons, the alternative is to connect the workspace through the commandline. Open a Developer Command for VS 201x (matching the version of Visual Studio you're trying to connect from) and from there issue the following command to force a connection:

tf vc status $/ /collection:https://yourtfsserver

After this one-time command that workspace should work again. if you have a lot of workspaces on your machine, or a lot of Project Collections on your TFS server, creating a little batch script may be useful ;).