Tuesday, October 30, 2007
FIX: Visual Studio Not Connecting to Team Foundation Server
Posted on Tuesday, October 30, 2007 12:16:26 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)  Comments [0] | 
Categories: Team System
I ran into this problem last week, and it had me stumped for quite a while.

Problem:
I'd start Visual Studio 2005, and try to connect to our Team Foundation Server, but all I would get is a pop-up box stating "Team Foundation Error - object reference not set to an instance of an object". Boom. All of the sudden I could not connect. Things had been working smoothly the day before, and I could connect on other systems so it was not my credentials.

Non-Fixes:
I tried repairing Visual Studio Team Edition, and the Team Foundation Explorer - neither made any difference, but it did eat 2 hours of time.

What Worked:
As usual Google came through - Dave Donaldson had experienced the same problem, and had written up the solution on his blog.

Turns out the culprit was un-installing the Source Gear Vault client software. We are in the (slow) process of migrating all our source code into SubVersion. At this point we have moved all our code out of our (very) old vault instance. Once that was done, I figured I'd un-install the client as well.

Seems that the uninstall unregisters / changes the registration of a number of IE dlls. Read Dave's post for more background, but the solution was to re-register the following dlls:

regsvr32 /s urlmon.dll
regsvr32 /s actxprxy.dll
regsvr32 /s shdocvw.dll
regsvr32 /s mshtml.dll
regsvr32 /s browseui.dll
regsvr32 /s jscript.dll
regsvr32 /s vbscript.dll
regsvr32 /s oleaut32.dll
After doing that, things were back to normal. Now I just need to migrate our Team System projects into SubVersion!

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