SOLVED: TF31003 error when trying to connect to Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2

Welcome searchers! This post is not exactly light reading for the casual .net enthusiast so I will presume that if you're reading this you have probably landed here via a search engine after having a TF31003 problem crop up.

Installed software / background

• Vista 64 bit
• VS 2010 beta 2
• TFS 2010 beta 2
• Single server / basic installation
• No errors on install
• Cannot log in to the TFS system at all - no combination of user accounts will be accepted

Scenario

At any login point within TFS (such as in the add server dialog, or the Team Foundation Server Administration Console > Application Tier > Administer Group Membership link) you get an error pop up that contains the following message:

TF31003: Your user account does not have permission to connect to the Team Foundation Server at http://yourcomputer:8080/tfs. Ask your server administrator to add the appropriate permissions to your account.

Cause of the problem

It turned out that issue was that the account I installed my TFS server in didn't have a password in it and the installer silently failed to add the required permissions to the account.

Solution

The solution is to create a new administrator account on your computer and then use a command line tool called tfsconfig.exe to add the required permissions to this account post-install.

Firstly you need to open up a command window in:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Tools\

Read my tip which explains an easy way to open a command window here in Windows Vista if you aren't sure how to do this.

You then need to execute the following command:

tfsconfig.exe accounts /add /account:"yourAccount" /accountType:applicationTier /password:yourPassword

Replace yourAccount with your account name that you created. If you have spaces in your account name you must put speech marks around the account name as demonstrated above. If you are on a domain (such as a corporate network) you might have to enter your domain such as "someDomain\yourUsername". You should be able to figure this out based on the username and password you use to login to windows. I guess its not very likely that you will have a computer on a domain without a password so this probably was a wasted sentence for everyone who reads this.

Replace yourPassword with the password you assigned to the account.

Press enter and you will see a page or two of text coming up while it reports all the places it is changing the configurations to.

m_requiredInputs

If you see only a few lines of text after you issue the command in the last section and it ends with m_requiredInputs in red text then you have mistyped.

In my case it turned out that I was typing add instead of /add - it let me get away without a forward slash at the start of accounts though.

Ok well I hope this problem matches your problem and you are solved and on the way to starting out on your TFS journey. I am very excited to play with all the features I have read about so lets both go and make a start now!

Alternative version of this post

I wrote an abbreviated version of this post as soon as I solved the problem so that a) I wouldn't forget and b) it would be sure to catch the eye of the TFS2010 developers. You can read it over on the official forums at:

• http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/tfssetup/thread/8e103318-4ce3-49be-9602-09d65ae72889