Sharing Virtual Machines with TFS Workspaces

We tend to use a virtual machine per external client so that we can keep things nicely separated. We can then easily add people to a project by giving them a copy of the virtual hard disk and they can be up and running in minutes (once they’ve renamed the guest machine name to avoid IP conflicts!)

That worked fine until we started using TFS, where it would moan that the workspace doesn’t exist because its now a different user accessing TFS. After some digging i found the answer was to edit the following file:

C:\Documents and Settings\[USER NAME]\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Team Foundation\2.0\Cache\VersionControl.config

<VersionControlServer>
  <Servers>
    <ServerInfo uri=http://[TFS URL HERE] 
                 repositoryGuid="[AUTO GENERATED GUID HERE]">
      <WorkspaceInfo 
            name="[WORKSPACE NAME HERE]" 
            ownerName="[DOMAIN]\[USER NAME]" 
            computer="[HOST NAME]">
        <MappedPaths>
          <MappedPath path="C:\Development\" />
        </MappedPaths>
      </WorkspaceInfo>
    </ServerInfo>
  </Servers>
</VersionControlServer>

You’ll need to change the WorkspaceInfo node attributes above and then remap your working folder in visual studio.