I work in a mostly windows environment, until relatively recently, where we acquired a new company. The new company was mostly Mac, so I acquired myself a Mac Air. With that, I decided to see how much of my Windows life I could transport over there. I use Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server for managing source control, so I had to find a good alternative to trying to get Visual Studio working on a Mac platform. Fortunately back in 2009, Microsoft acquired a company called Teamprise, which developer a client that worked on a variety of platforms. Microsoft re-released that as TFS Anywhere. I use TFS Anywhere to edit a lot of the files in TFS on my Mac, via Eclipse.
A few weeks ago I stumbled on an odd issue where Eclipse wasn’t keeping in-sync with what TFS Anywhere was doing. For example, we keep our Nagios configs checked into TFS for version control. I was using the Mac, and had added several new contact files. When I was back using my Windows machine, I told Eclipse to trigger the “Get Latest” function on TFS Anywhere, which it dutifully did, then threw an error…
The item $/infrastructure/Nagios/etc/objects/contacts/newcontact.cfg already exists
It repeated this error for each of the new contacts I had added. What appeared to be happening is TFS Anywhere was getting the files, notifying Eclipse the files were there, which triggered the project to add them to the file list, which then in turn triggered Eclipse to try an add them to TFS. A nice little circle going there. I thought maybe it was just a quirk and closed the project. When I reopened the project, the same error occurred again, this time I didn’t even tell Eclipse to do any updates, this occurred just on opening the project.
After some skimming around, I discovered this is likely a bug in TFS Anywhere, and the simple solution is to tell Eclipse to update the server information. This is done using the “Team” context menu (right click the project), then selecting “Refresh Server Information”. Here is the reference post I found the details on.