TFS 2010 Web Access - Project Collections don’t showed

This morning I’ve lost a couple of hours with an enterprise customer with a very annoying problem.

• We’re using different Project Collections to segregate permission and delegate administrations among different countries/departments/sand-boxed environments;
• Since a couple of days, when I add a new Project Collection, it doesn’t showed on the Project Selection window of TFS Web Access

• Indeed Visual Studio 2010 worked perfectly, showing all the expected Project Collections accordingly to the granted permissions.
• After having checked (and forced) all TFS permissions, logs and web-configs what I did had just forcing an option on TFS Web Access web.config

• I had to change the following option:

   1: <tfServers>

   2:  <!-- <add name="http://server:8080" /> 

   3: -->

   4: </tfServers>

• First I removed the comment, forcing to connect to the TFS server DNS URL (http://tfs.mycompany.com/tfs)



• This wasn’t working too so I forced Web Access to connect to a specific Project Collection URI (http://tfs.mycompany.com/tfs/oneofmyprojectcollection) and unexpectedly this worked!





• I don’t know why but almost probably specifying a project collection uri force TFS to enumerate the root collection.





• I’d like to remember that this option is used when you need to decouple TFS Web Access from TFS Application Tier, splitting the module on two different servers.