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TFS 2015 - Error on the ‘Assigned To’ field after upgrading to TFS 2015

After upgrading to TFS 2015 a customer called me as some users were having issues with the ‘Assigned To’ field after the upgrade.

When these users opened a specific PBI/Bug, they saw the following error:

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The issue only happened for users that exists multiple time in TFS with the same name but different AD accounts:

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The issue is caused by a change in TFS 2015 , with the introduction of the concept of an identity field. This concept is introduced to fix issues that involve duplicate display names. Previously, if two users had the same name, TFS could not differentiate between them. During the upgrade to TFS 2015, all applicable fields are upgraded to identity fields and usernames are replaced with the following structure ‘display name <email or domain\alias>’. . However this is an issue for fields where syncnamechanges=false as the string value itself is returned from the database. This causes the error above because  for example ‘Bart Wullems <domain\bawu>’ is not a valid user.

Two possible workarounds to fix this:

  • Before the upgrade, update any templates that have the syncnamechangesproperty set to false for fields that have identity rules to set the syncnamechanges property to true.
  • Add an <AllowExistingValue /> rule on any identity field that has the syncnamechanges property set to false.

More info: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/3077455

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