"No history entries were found for the item and version combination specified"

July 2007 - My worst TFS fear almost happened today. I Right Clicked on a folder under Source Control and selected View History using Team Explorer. After spinning for a few seconds I got the error "No history entries were found for the item and version combination specified." "What the heck is that?" I said to myself. I was able to tree through the source and open a file, but couldn't do a Get Latest or perform any other function. "Am I loosing my mind? This just worked fine yesterday."

My first few hypothesis's were based on my previous experiences as a VSS administrator. "We have a corruption issue," I screamed out to my local contemporaries. The .NET guys had worry written all over their faces. The Java guys started to snicker.

I Googled the error and got back two unrelated hits. I Lived it, can ironically got the same two hits. Coincidence?

Anyway, after suffering a near break down, for some reason I decided to check the permissions of the project. When Right Clicking on the project, selecting Properties, then Security, the project had no one setup with permissions (or so I thought). That was odd? Since I'm part of the [Server]\Team Foundation Server Administrators group I thought I'd be able to add my account. Nope.

I then logged into the App Tier (don't tell our system administrators this) and checked the Security. Sure enough, I could see there was one group who had access to the project and it didn't include me. The Team Project administrator in London had adjusted permissions for the project. We centralized the Server administration, but decentralized some of the Team Project administration. I Logged onto the App Tier with an account in the local Administrator group and was able to add my account. Back on my machine then, I was able to do View History just fine. .NET guys were happy to see the error was so simple to resolve, the Java guys frowned and stuck their faces back in Eclipse.

So the moral of the story is, if you get the error "No history entries were found for the item and version combination specified" make sure you have correct permissions setup on the Source Control projects (a.k.a Folders).