You can connect a Visual Studio 2008 IDE instance to a TFS 2010 server, as detailed in Martin Hinshelwood’s blog, but I cannot stress enough you have to have VS2008 SP1 installed. If you don’t, you get an error dialog when you enter the URL for the TFS server saying the URL contains invalid characters.

This seems a simple rule, but as I found today it is easy to not realise your PC is not patched. You look in the about dialog for Visual Studio and it says SP1 installed, but the Team Foundation Client has not been. This was because the following installation order was followed:

  1. Install VS2008
  2. Patch with SP1
  3. Install Team Foundation Client

The SP1 needed to be run again to patch the client then all was OK