Visual Studio, TFS – Cheeps checking files out, There appears to be a discrepancy between the solution’s source control information about some project(s)

Over the last few hours I started seeing an annoying problem with Visual Studio and TFS on a geographically distributed software project that I am working on, Visual Studio kept on automatically checking out files that hadn’t been edited, I also started getting the following message before the files were automatically checked out:

“There appears to be a discrepancy between the solution’s source control information about some project(s) and the information in the project file(s).
Inbox”

After some investigation we figured out what the problem was – it was annoying problem, but in this case quite easy to fix.

When the TFS server was set-up originally we were all told to access it by its IP address over a partially set-up VPN. Now once the VPN was properly set-up, project contributors started to use the TFS server’s host-name instead of the IP address (as they should).

However, not all of the contributors were notified of the change and continued to use the IP address. Visual studio would update any files that had TFS info within them, checking them out and altering them to use either the TFS host name or IP address depending on the particulars of the local Visual Studio TFS set-up – hence all the trouble and all of the annoying error messages!

As soon as we changed from using the IP address to using the host name the problem went away.

It may well appear again however, as soon as someone else who uses the IP address instead of the host name checks in some files…

TFS is quite a good source control system but every now and again you can hear worrying echoes of its ignoble Visual Source Safe history and some of the hair-brained and crazy stuff that comes with it!