TFS 2017 Missing Icons

Question

Good morning! I have been struggling with an issue for several days and it is impacting our development team from doing their daily routines. We recently upgraded from TFS 2013 to TFS 2017. We then tried updating to TFS 2017.1 and no change. Upon the upgrade, several of the icons have disappeared. I have found this in various forums and tried their fixes yet still the icons are missing. I have tried the following that I have found about this problem that others reported as fixing the issue:

Made sure the TFS service account had the correct permissions

- Allow log on locally
- log on as a service
- impersonate a client after login

Add the TFS service account as a domain admin (the server is a DC so cannot add as local admin account)

I have tried from different browsers (IE, Chrome, and Firefox)
- the icons do not show in any of these. although in IE the placeholders do not show where in Firefox and Chrome the placeholder boxes show.

Set IE browser to Use software rendering instead of GPU rendering.

All the menus work once you mouse over to find them yet only a few of the icons appear.

Answer 1

Are you by any chance using https to access your tfs server?  If so, I've seen where TFS can supply the icons as http in an https connection, and therefore the web security does not allow the icons to be rendered.

Answer 2

Unfortunately we are not using https. The odd part is that I am not seeing anything in the logs, etc. that indicate an error of some form. Everything functions as it should, just many of (not all) the icons do not appear in the header portion. I have checked the files for these icons and they do not appear to be missing or corrupt. One of those issue that makes a guy pull his hair out lol. 

Answer 3

Hi,
sorry that you are having problems with TFS 2017. Do you see any 404s in the Fiddler capture?
If you see 404s, could you email Fiddler capture to me at vladimir dot khvostov at microsoft.com?
What OS are you running? Is it English or localized?
Where did you install TFS? c:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 15.0\ or somewhere else?
Could you include some screenshot with missing images?
Thanks,

--Vladimir

Answer 4

Vladimir,

THanks for the response. I have emailed you the requested info. I look forward to hearing back from you.

Answer 5

The issue ending up being the Bowtie.woof file. Vladimir was able to determine the file was smaller than it should be and upon replacing the file the issue was resolved. Big kudos to Vladimir. His steps took me about 30 minutes in total to perform and that led to the resolution.

Answer 6

I have the same problem and noticed the "Bowtie.woof" file giving 500 errors in the dev tools. where can I get the 'correct' version of this file?

Answer 7

Hi,
if you are seeing HTTP 500 when servicing static content, most likely your service account does not have "Impersonate a client after authentication" privilege.
To check/add permission you can do the following:
1) Open "Local Security Policy" editor.
2) Navigate to Security Settings>Local Policies>User Rights Assignment
3) Double click on "Impersonate a client after authentication"

Thanks,

--Vladimir

Answer 8

That was the problem, thanks x100!

Answer 9

Where is this bowtie.woof file and how do you replace it?

Answer 10

Hello Vladimir,

could you make the correct bowtie.woff file, public available?

In my case, I've TFS2017 Update 2 running
My file has 39920 bytes and the SHA256 Hash is de60b72c4d63229efc04958c093df9cf56e36aa62da1cef0d0355441a9c1d169 *bowtie.woff

Answer 11

Hi Michael,
you have the right file.
It is problematic to publish bowtie.woff publicly, because this font is not backward compatible. In other words, you cannot take font TFS 2018 RC1 and use it in TFS 2017.
Thanks,

--Vladimir

Answer 12

Hello Vladimir,

Thank you for the further information.
I'm still struggeling a bit. The mentioned "Impersonate a client after authentication" is solving the icon problem. After I've assigned the privilege to my service account (by granting local administrative rights, due to our GPO), whenever a part of the TFS website is loaded, I'm requested to enter my credentials, even when I store them. That are a lot of typed passwords, even to display the smallest site. When I keep the ESC Key pressed, I get the correct content, after 5-10 seconds or so.

I guess, there is some other setting / GPO incorrect?

Do you have an idea?

Thanks

Answer 13

There is a typo, it is bowtie.woff, It is located within the static content of the TFS website

%program files%\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 15.0\Application Tier\Web Services\_static\tfs\Dev15.M117.5\_content\Fonts\Icons\bowtie.woff

Answer 14

Michael,
this is really strange. What browser are you using?

could you try to upgrade to TFS 2017.2 or TFS 2017.3 RC?

If this is not possible feasible, could you try to configure anonymous authentication to use Application Pool identity for the Team Foundation Server site?

Thanks,

--Vladimir

Answer 15

Hello Vladimir,

The anonymous authentication was already configured to use Application Pool identity.

I'm using Opera and Internet Explorer, both directly on the server (Windows Server 2012 R2). Currently I would prefer not to install another version (unless there is a good indication, that the behavior would be correct then)

I have a strong guess, that this comes due to some unusual GPO of my company.

Answer 16

Hello Vladimir,

I'm still struggling with that issue.
I need to set up a production server, thus I fear the RC versions are not an option (Release History says further database upgrades won't be possible).

I changed to NTLM authentification, but no change. To note is, that there is a self signed SSL certificate used because we have no certificate authority in our domain.

I'll try to reinstall TFS2017.2 and turn off SSL. Do you have any other ideas?

My problem seems somewhat related to https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/content/problem/16658/negotiate-authentication-change-made-access-to-tfs.html