Group Membership in TE2008: link to SharePoint not working from within VS2008

Question

Hello,

 

We experience a problem in Team Explorer 2008 with the Group Membership link to the SharePoint portal.

 

When you right-click a TFS-project and then select "Team Project Settings -> Group Membership", the window opens where you can set the TFS Group Memberships (admin, contributor, ...).

In that Window, 2 links are provided for setting the security on the 2 other locations (Reporting Services and SharePoint Portal).

 

The problem is that clicking the "Windows Sharepoint Services Site Administration" link generates this error message:

The Team Foundation Server could not locate the online Site Administration application for this team project portal in Windows SharePoint Services. The most likely cause of this error is that the language settings on the team project portal do not match the current language of your Visual Studio client. The location of Site Administration is specific to the language of the project portal. Contact the Team Foundation Server administrator for availability information of Site Administration for this project portal. For more information, see the Windows SharePoint Services Administrator's Guide.

We found out that the problem is caused by the regional settings of the PC on which Team Explorer is running.

To be more specific, it is the "Standards and formats" setting that is important ("Control panel -> Regional and Language Options").

Mine is normally set to "Dutch (Belgium)", and when I set it to "English (United States)", the link works as expected.

 

Since I'm working in an international organisation, we simply cannot set everybody's PC to "English (United States)" (all Windows installations are English by the way).

 

I also noticed that there is an "International Settings" option in Visual Studio, and this is set to "English" (the other option is "Same as Microsoft Windows"), so it seems that Team Explorer doesn't look at this VS-setting and always uses the Windows-setting.

 

Another fact is that in VSTS2005 and TE2005, this Sharepoint-link always worked, regardless of the Windows- or Visual Studio language setting.

 

We're using WSS3.0 on the TFS2008 installation and WSS2.0 on the TFS2005 installation.

The client-PC is WinXP Pro.

 

Does anybody know how to solve this issue?

 

Thanks,

 

Charles

Answer 1

As for now you have to use a workaround to set the security in SharePoint.

 

1. Exit the Group Membership dialog.

2. Right click the Teram Project in Team Explorer and select "Show Project Portal".

3. In SharePoint select Site Actions | Site Settings.

4. Continue with setting permissions as usual

 

You can also navigate directly to the administration page for a Team Project using the URL http://TFSServerName/Sites/TeamProjectName/_layouts/settings.aspx

 

A third option would be to use the TFS Admin Tool (http://www.codeplex.com/TFSAdmin)

 

Regards, Christian Nielsen

Answer 2

You may also be able to work around this by installing the relevant SharePoint language pack. I've filed a bug suggesting the client not use the OS locale when trying to reach the admin site; but fixing this properly will require more substantial changes.

Answer 3

Playing around with this a bit more it seems like you can get around the problem by just adding an empty folder under the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS folder and name it with the number of the locale you want to support e.g. 1053 for Swedish or 2067 for Dutch/Belgium.

 

So what is the number of the locale I want to support? I found this list of locales and their corresponding number http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HP100305701033.aspx.

 

I have only tested this in a VPC so it still needs to be verified to work in a real environment. It's also probably a good idea to remove the folders you create before any attempts are done to service TFS or WSS.

 

Christian Nielsen