When you use Team Foundation Server, in most cases you need to use Team Explorer as well. Sometimes the folders in Team Explorer show a little red cross. It means that the functionality of the folder is not available. There can be several causes for this.

In this post I will show you the “different kinds” of red crosses and how to solve it.

Red Cross on Work Items Folder

Most of the time this can mean 2 things

1. The user has no rights to access the Work Item Folder.

This is not something that happens a lot. The user can only add a Team Project when he or she has sufficient rights. Otherwise the Team Project is not shown in the dialog. If the rights are revoked afterwards, the user still sees the Team Project but he does not have rights to access the folder.

To grant a user rights follow these steps

• Right-click project (or root project for all projects)
• Select "Team Project Settings".
• Select "Group Membership".
• Selecting the group to which you want to assign the user.
• Click the "Properties" button.
• Select the "Windows User or Group" radio button.
• Clicking the "Add..." button.
• Selecting the required user(s) and confirm it all.

2. The client cache for Team Foundation Server must be cleared.

Visual Studio and Team Explorer provide a caching mechanism which can get out of sync.  If you switch servers, the client can become confused.  This can result in the red cross on the work item folder, but also on other folders (for example Builds, Documents and Reports)

A way of solving this, is to delete the cache for the TFS on the client machine.  Delete the folders inside the cache folder.

XP (TFS 2005 [1.0] and TFS 2008 [2.0]):

C:\Documents and Settings\{your account}\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Team Foundation\[1.0] or [2.0]\Cache

VISTA (TFS 2005 [1.0] and TFS 2008 [2.0]):

C:\Users\{your account}\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Team Foundation\[1.0] or [2.0]\Cache

If one of the above does not work, take a look here for more technical causes.

Red Cross on Documents Folder

What happens a lot is that administrators grant users into TFS (by the Group Membership Dialog). This does not mean that the users have right for Documents. Documents are stored in SharePoint and the user must have rights there as well. Grant the user rights on the Team Site to solve the cross.

If you want to grant users for all the different environments (TFS, SharePoint and ReportServer), you can try this open source tool(TFS Admin Tool). This gives you the possibility to do it all at once. You can download the tool here.

Setting SharePoint Rights

• Right-click project and select "Show Project Portal".
• Click "Site Settings"
• In the "Administration" section, click "Manage Users"
• Click "Add Users"
• Fill in the list of users and follow the instructions. (DOMAINNAME\USERNAME)
  

Another option is also the Client cache. See the “Red Cross on Work Items Folder” section for this.

Red Cross on Reports Folder

What happens in SharePoint (no rights) also happens in Reports. The user does not have rights on Reporting Server. See also “Red Cross on Documents Folder”

Setting Reporting Server Rights

• Right-click project and select "Show Project Portal".
• Click "Reports".
• Click "Home".
• Click "Properties".
• Click "New Role Assignment"
• Add the new user(s), select their role(s) and click OK.

Another option is also the Client cache. See the “Red Cross on Work Items Folder” section for this.

Red Cross on Team Members Folder

With installation of the VS2008 TFS Power Tools( October 2008 Release), you will get some extra folders within Team Explorer. One of them is Team Members. This folder (not actually but it can expand and collapse), contains all the Team Members and allows you to IM with them.

To solve the red cross here do the following.

• Install VS2008 SP1
• Uninstall the Power Tools
• Reinstall the Power Tools

The the Team Members show something like this

Red Cross on Other Folders

Always try the “Client Cache” solution to solve the red cross issue. If that does not work and the users have the right rights, something must be wrong on the server. Try the event log and IIS log to get more data.