TFS MSSCCI Provider Beta 2 Released and it works* with VFP

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Rob Caron (and a number of other folk) blogged yesterday that the next release of the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider has been posted. This is great news for people using VS2003, VS2002, VS6, SQL Server Enterprise Manager, or any other IDE that supports the MSSCCI Source Control API.

In particular, for me this is great news because I can now use TFS as my SCC provider for my VFP projects (as opposed to the Beta 1 experience). I’ve recently set up a TFS server in my home office, so connecting to is from VFP has been a priority.

The reason for the asterisk in the title of this post is that there's one important thing the download page doesn’t tell you. The Beta 2 binaries are not strongly named, so attempting to use the plugin as it is results in an error: "TFMscciSvr.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience" (this isn't restricted to VFP BTW).

Buck Hodges has posted a work-around for this. Basically you need to disable strong name validation (for these assemblies only). Copy the following text into a .reg file and execute it (remembering that it is your registry and that you should back it up before you do anything to it).

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\StrongName\Verification\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Msscci,B03F5F7F11D50A3A] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\StrongName\Verification\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Controls,B03F5F7F11D50A3A] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\StrongName\Verification\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Controls,B03F5F7F11D50A3A] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\StrongName\Verification\Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking,B03F5F7F11D50A3A] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\StrongName\Verification\TFMscciGui,B03F5F7F11D50A3A] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\StrongName\Verification\TFMscciSvr,B03F5F7F11D50A3A]

Running this will disable the Strong Name Verification for assemblies with the hash values listed. Now you can choose the MSSCCI TFS provider in the Source Code Plugin Selection Drop Down on the Projects tab of VFP's options dialog.

Note that you'll need to create your project from a Team Explorer, but once it's created you can interact with it happily from VFP.