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Why am I no longer authorized for TFS project?

Sometimes, seemingly out of the blue, I get an alert that I am unauthorized to access the .NET project in TFS that I had been working on a few weeks earlier. Here's what has gone wrong and how to fix it.

Is it a network issue? Visual Studio appears able to connect.


Yet I appear to suddenly be not authorized.


Is it a credentials issue? If so, why? What's wrong? 

It happens infrequently enough that it can take several minutes to work out just what caused the problem, yet is common enough that I am using this post as a way of saving myself some wasted time down the road.

I currently work in an environment with a policy of frequent changes to your password for our  workstations. Whenever this happens, Visual Studio reports that I am not authorized to access the project in our Team Foundation Server.

The reason for the error is that Visual Studio uses cached credentials, and these cached credentials are not automatically updated when the workstation password is changed.

Steps to fix:

1. Open the Settings or Control Panel for Windows 10
2. Open the Credentials Manager


3. Find the TFS credentials entry under Windows Credentials

4. Expand the entry and click Edit


5. Enter the new password (in our case matching the workstation password) and click Save

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