TFS 2015 Won't accept my Admin Credentials

Question

I'm trying to gain access to a project repository on a TFS 2015 server through the Team Explorer in Visual Studio 2015. I'm running Visual Studio with my Local machine Admin Account and try to add the server through Manage Connections, at which point I'm prompted to authenticate. I try to authenticate and am just repeatedly asked to enter my credentials, if I cancel I receive a message TF31003 and TF30063. What makes it odd to me is that I'm able to go navigate to the server through the web interface where I have been set up as an administrator, I can view all of the projects, even changing permissions on a server and project basis if desired.

Somethings to note that may be a factor but I don't know if they are.

• I am logged into my local machine as a none admin user.
• I run Visual Studio as an Admin using a separately created admin account. Both my user and admin accounts are active users on the domain.
• I ran IE as an admin and can view the TFS web interface using that admin account.
• I'm able to access TFS from my non-admin account but not if I run Visual Studio as an admin. I need to run VS as an admin a project that needs to interface with IIS.
• Neither my user or my admin accounts are authorized to access the machine that tfs is running on. I don't think this is an issue because my non admin account can access the projects.

Somethings that I have tried.

• Cleared IE cashes running as both admin and user accounts.
• In Windows Credentials I added another entry for the server (I still need to keep access to the user account)
• I added myself explicitly as the administrator of the particular project I need to access

If anyone can provide some guidance I would greatly appreciate it, I feel like I have wasted so much time trying to figure this out and it could be something simple that I'm just looking over.

Answer 1

Since you could connect to web portal properly, this should be a VS client connectivity issue.

Seems the VS has cached your pre account--None admin user. Try below workaround:

• Go to Credential Manager
• Delete the TFS related credentials
• Then in Credential Manager add Generic Credentials for the TFS account. This would overwrite the cached credentials.

Also clear TFS and VS cache. Then reconnect to TFS in Visual Studio.

If you are using domain user it shows nothing TFS related credentials under Credential manager, in this case please try to run Visual Studio using this command instead:

runas /netonly /user:<account> devenv.exe

This should have the Visual Studio to run with another Windows user so it can connect to remote TFS with different credentials.