After updating my local test instance of TFS2010 to service pack 1 I came across the following error when trying to connect to a team project collection:

I launched the TFS Administration Console and selected the Default Collection from the Team Project Collections section, my first thought was to try stopping and starting the Default Collection. After shutting down the Team Project Collection I noticed under the status tab ‘Servicing Collection’ job had been queued for  some time for the Team Project Collection.

I launched services manager and found that the Visual Studio Team Foundation Background Job Agent was disabled. I enabled this service and rerun the job. After a minute or so the job changed from queued to success. Ensuring the Team Project Collection was back online I was able to successfully connect to the Team Project Collection.

For testing and demonstrations I have a basic installation of TFS2010 installed on my Windows 7 boot. Whist demonstrating the branching within TFS to a customer I came across an error when attempting to branch a folder by label:

Branching by label is something I do frequently in our production TFS environment so I was confident the issue had to be with my local TFS instance. After a quick search online one of the many suggestions relating to this error was a mismatch between versions of TFS 2010 and Visual Studio 2010. After checking the version of both products I found I had patched Visual Studio 2010 to service pack 1, however as my TFS installation was only for testing I had not ensured that the patch level was up to date.

Once I installed service pack 1 for TFS2010 I was able to branch a folder by a label successfully.

If you use Visual Studio Database Projects you may be familiar with the VSDBCMD utility to control the deployment of a database project.

Whilst testing a custom Team Foundation Server 2010 build template which included an activity to deploy a database project using the VSDBCMD, I came across the following error:

*** The target database schema provider could not be determined. Deployment cannot continue.

After looking into the error it turned out that the SQL Instance name in the connection string was incorrect. After resolving this issue the database project deployed to the SQL Instance as expected.