“Red-X” on Work Items folder in Team Explorer

Manoj brings us another of his troubleshooting tidbits. This time around it’s Red-C on Work Items… an admittedly rare occurrence when compared to the much more prevalent Red-X on Documents and/or Reports, but it does happen some times… so Manoj is here to help. :-)

What do you do if you see a Red-X for Work Items in your Team Project and would like some direction on where to start troubleshooting. I recently ran into this issue and I needed a quick way to find what the underlining error. I had no errors to help me start troubleshooting this problem. The work item tracking web service was working and the event logs were not throwing anything helpful (or I could have easily missed it).

What I did was to run the witexport command which is a component that works with work items. When I ran this command, it gave me an error (“TF201072: A user or group could not be found.”) which eventually lead me to the solution. So, based on the error you can deduce what possible issue you could be facing.

I thought I would share this and hopefully it might help you as much as it did me.

Manoj

Technorati Tags: Team Foundation Server,Troubleshooting,Work Item Tracking,Red-X