WTF

If you are using MSBuild 4.0.30319 and try to set the property IgnoreStandardErrorWarningFormat on the Exec task you might run into the following message error:

error MSB4064: The "IgnoreStandardErrorWarningFormat" parameter is not supported by the "Exec" task.

The solution is very, very simple: be sure to add ToolsVersion="4.0" to the Project tag.

The solution contains several projects, including test projects. All of which now target .Net Framework 2.0 (although some already reference .Net Framework 3.0 or 3.5 assemblies). We do not want to upgrade to .Net Framework 4.0 just yet. Goal of the upgrade is to have every project in the solution target .Net Framework 3.5.

After converting the solution to VS2010 most of the projects reference .Net Framework 2.0. Some of which do not build, because of references to assemblies targeted at a higher .Net Framework. Visual Studio 2010 does not allow cross-referencing to higher .Net Framework assemblies. Fixing this problem is quite simple: just re-target the project to .Net Framework 3.5.

All of the test projects have been set to .Net Framework 4.0. One could discuss if this is acceptable for test projects as these will not be released. But for now it was decided to keep every project targeted at .Net Framework 3.5. Fortunately most of the test projects were easily re-targeted to .Net Framework 3.5. Hint: if you run into problems here, make sure VS2010 SP1Rel is installed.

For one of the test projects the solution just would not load it if re-targeted at .Net Framework 3.5. Each time the project was re-targeted, the conversion wizard would just pop up and set it back to .Net Framework 4.0. Eventually we found a workaround by editing the project file by hand after the conversion.

Two manual fixes were needed:

• Change reference of "Microsoft.QualityTools.UnitTestFramework" to
  <Reference Include="Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.UnitTestFramework, Version=10.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a, processorArchitecture=MSIL" />
• Remove contents of the tag <FileUpgradeFlags>0</FileUpgradeFlags>, which hints VS2010 to start the conversion wizard.

Unable to connect to this Team Foundation Server...

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 pops up a nice dialog with three possible reasons for failure:

• The Team Foundation Server name, port number or protocol is incorrect.
• The Team Foundation Server is offline.
• Password is expired or incorrect.

They should have added: Your machine.config contains an error. In this case a coworker added an appSettings section to the machine.config. He added valid xml; no errors at all. So why blame the config settings you might ask...

Well, apparently the appSettings node must be located below the configSections node. If not, all kind of strange things (like not being able to connect to TFS) will occur.