Updated VS2012 to VS2015 on Buiild server. Now “No TFS assemblies were found on the system” when connecting to VCS (TFS) root

Question

We have teamCity on it's own (internal) build server, and TFS on another internal Build server. All was working hunky dory until...

I've just removed VS2012 from the build server and installed VS2015 on there, as all the dev team have now upgraded (most have been using it for 6 months).

TeamCity now cannot connect to TFS and I get the following when testing the connection to the VCS Root:

ERROR - No TFS assemblies were found on the system. Please make sure you have Microsoft Team Explorer 8.0, 9.0, 10.0 or 11.0 installed

I've seen various posts stating Team Explorer is required, so...

• have now installed that (seemed to use a VS2013 shell) and have connected to TFS from within there.
• I've also connected to TFS from within VS2015.
• Have rebooted the server

What do I need to do to resolve the error? Which TFS Assemblies is this actually looking for?

NB Full text of error received when testing connection

Test connection failed in v6 :: CI - Build v6. TFS failed. ExitCode: -1
stdout: TFS Native Verifier v7.1 Copyright (C) 2006-2012 JetBrains s.r.o.
Running under .NET Framework 4.0.30319.42000
ERROR - No TFS assemblies were found on the system. Please make sure you have Microsoft Team Explorer 8.0, 9.0, 10.0 or 11.0 installed

command: C:\TeamCity\webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\plugins\.unpacked\tfs\bin\tfs-native.exe @@c:\TeamCity\bin\..\temp\TC-TFS-20-3556_30\command.params, in file: {http://[myTFSServer:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection/, /user:***** /hash:S, C:\TeamCity\temp\TC-TFS-20-3556_29.result, ConnectionTest, $/v6/}

Answer 1

OK, for the moment I've got round this by installing Team Explorer for visual studio 2012. The build is still failing , but at least the build is able to start, which was the original issue - ie TeamCity can now connect the the vcs root.

This obviously isn't an optimal solution as we've supposedly now moved on from vs2012, but for now I'm up and running.

VS2015 is natively supported in TeamCity 9 so the long term solution (which I may well have to do sooner than planned) is to upgrade TC to the latest version - we're currently on 7.1.3...

UPDATE: OK, as we had everything backed up, I decided that this dirty workaround didn't cut the mustard, so removed Team Explorer for VS2012, and updated to TeamCity 9, which was in the longer term plan anyway. This now works natively without any smelly workaround. You could argue this should have been done from the start, but the initial plan wasn't to upgrade everything at once, but to play safe.