Lately I've been using Team Foundation Server (TFS) for my source control and Team Build to perfom builds on a dedicated machine. Everything was working pretty good until the other night, I created a new team project and added some projects to the source control. Following this I created a new Team Build and tried to execute it, but I received an error, TF42053: The build machine is not configured to build for server..." I received this error when I tried to invoke Team Builds that were previously building correctly as well, not just on the new project. The image of the dialog box is shown below (click for larget image).

As instructed I opened up the TFSBuildService.exe config file which is at %Program Files%/Microsoft Visual Studio 8/Common7/IDE/PrivateAssemblies/TFSBuildService.exe.config, I opened up that file and located the AllowedTeamServer key element. Originally it looked like:

By the way my TFS setup is on a single tier, so the application and data tier are both on the same machine, and that is also the machine that I was trying to run the build on. So I changed the value to:

Then I restarted the service and invoked the team build again, and all was fine. I'm not sure why I was able to build previously but not now. The only things I can think of a few changes to the envrionment:
  1) a minor hardware change (I disconnected a removable hard drive from that machine)
  2) the IP address of that machine changed
  3) machine was restarted a few times
  4) new team project with its source control
So I'm not quite sure why I received this error, but I'm glad it was an easy fix. Now I can continue working on my project.

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi