Migrating a TFS workspace to a new Windows user

The IT guys at work decided that our Windows domain should be deprecated and created new Windows users on a brand new domain. Among the many problems it gave us, there was the TFS workspaces which are hosted at a partner's datacenter.

So when they brought the old domain down, TFS started acting crazy. The reason being the workspaces being owned by the old users and unaccessible to the new ones.

If you're trying to migrate workspaces between users and you search about it, you'll probably find some "tf workspaces" commands. The problem is that these commands will seem to run fine but will fail to replace the workspace's owner.

So here's an "easy" step-by-step to do it through VisualStudio. It assumes you can still have access to your previous user:

1. You must sign-in to TFS using your previous user. To confirm, look into Windows Start Menu --> Control Panel --> User Accounts --> Credential Manager and look for entries related to your TFS server. If wrong user, edit and change. Be sure to change all related entries (I had two of them).
2. In VisualStudio, go to File --> Source Control --> Advanced --> Workspaces, and for each workspace:
3. Edit, then expand the "Advanced >>" tab.
4. Under "Owner", put the full user name (including the domain).
5. Click OK. If no error, skip to step 11.
6. If error due to pending changes, do as suggested and shelve them as follows:
7. Open "Source Control Explorer".
8. Right click on the top entry under "Folders" and select "Shelve pending changes".
9. Be sure to have "Preserve pending changes locally" UNCHECKED, set a meaningful name such as "UserMigration" and Shelve.
10. Go back to step 2.
11. Close VS.
12. Remove or update your TFS credentials to the new user (see step 1 to see where to find them).
13. Reopen VS.
14. If you never went through steps 7 to 10, skip on to step 18.
15. Unshelve your changes under File --> Source Control --> Find --> Find Shelvesets.
16. On the "Find Shelvesets" window, set the user to the previous user and double-click the shelveset you created on steps 7 to 10.
17. Click "Unshelve changes". If there are conflicts, you'll probably want to keep the shelved version, not the workspace version.
18. Done!