Connect to visualstudio.com from Team Explorer Everywhere CLC

Question

I'm trying to connect from Team Explorer Everywhere command line client on Windows to a Team Foundation Service project at visualstudio.com, but I get "access denied" messages.

The username and password I'm passing are definitely correct, and are the email and password from my microsoft live ID used to create the account. I have no problems accessing the service through the website, or via Visual Studio 2012 on a different machine.

tf workspace /new /server:https://<something>.visualstudio.com/defaultcollection
Username: example@microsoft.com
Password: ********

Any ideas? One thought I had was that maybe the '@' character in the e-mail was causing the username to be interpreted as a Windows domain, or that maybe SSL wasn't being used correctly?

Answer 1

You cannot authenticate with a Live ID using the Team Explorer Everywhere command-line client. We cannot raise a web browser from the client and capture the Live ID authentication tokens in a secure way across platforms.

Instead, you need to set up alternate credentials as described at https://tfs.visualstudio.com/en-us/home/news/2012/aug-27/ .

Answer 2

If anyone is has received this error after March 18th 2014, this is because the password requirements for visualstudio.com have been tightened.

If all of a sudden you get this message 'Failed to erase credential: Element not found fatal: Authentication failed for 'https://*.visualstudio.com/defaultcollection/_git/*/''

I was able to solve it by deleting my alternate credentials, and recreating them (at which point I also found out my old password wasn't usable anymore).