Thursday, November 20, 2014

Error When Editing TFS Build Templates on TFS 2013 Update 3 with Visual Studio 2013 RTM

Today I ran into an interesting backward compatibility problem regarding TFS and Visual Studio 2013.

I was working on a team project hosted on a freshly upgraded production TFS 2013.3 server (it was upgraded from 2010) and I needed to create some new TFS build definitions. I was using Visual Studio 2013 RTM.

The problem occurred in the New Build Definition dialog, on the Process tab, where the Build process file drop-down was empty! When I tried to register a new process file using the New button I kept getting the following error message for any of the existing build templates chosen from source control:

TF277000: A build process template for ‘templatename.xaml’ already exists for team project ProjectName. You cannot create another build process template for the same file. Use the existing one instead.


TFS277000: A build process template for ‘templatename.xaml’ already exists for tem project ProjectName. You cannot create another build process template for the same file. Use the existing one instead.


Solutions on the Internet suggested clearing the TFS local client cache and/or clearing the TFS server cache which didn't help. What was even more confusing is the fact that other team projects, which were also upgraded within the same TFS project collection, did not present the same problem.

It turned out that the error occurred because I was using Visual Studio 2013 RTM for this action. After switching to Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 the error disappeared and the drop-down correctly filled with installed build templates.

Note: Another problem related to the same error occurred when I tried to edit existing build templates. The message was:
TFS214008: No build definition was found with the URI vstfs:///Build/Definition/XY. Either the URI does not exist, or USER does not have permission to access it.