Troubleshooting checkin policies

If you see an error like this:

[ERROR] Policy: Internal error in Changeset Comments Policy.
Error loading the Changeset Comments Policy policy (The policy assembly 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.PowerTools.CheckinPolicies.ChangesetComments, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a' is not registered.).
Installation instructions: To install this policy, follow the instructions in CheckForComments.cs.

The first thing to check is that you can perform normal TFS checkins (in Visual Studio). If you can't, first solve that problem, and then check git-tfs again.

If you can perform checkins in Visual Studio, then the problem is that git-tfs can't find the checkin policy (in this example above, ChangesetComments) that the Team Foundation Server told it to run. Depending on how this happened, there are a couple of possible solutions.

Git-tfs should be using the same version of Visual Studio that you are.

Sometimes git-tfs uses a different version of Visual Studio than you are. This most commonly happens when you are developing with the previous version of Visual Studio (e.g. VS2010), and install the latest version (e.g. VS2012) to try it out, but the checkin policies are not yet registered with the new version of Visual Studio. Git-tfs by default prefers the newest version of Visual Studio. To see which version of the TFS client libraries git-tfs is using, do this:

C:\> git tfs info

git version 1.8.0.msysgit.0

git-tfs version 0.16.1.0 (TFS client library 11.0.0.0 (MS)) (32-bit)
 C:\tools\gittfs\git-tfs.exe

TFS client library 11 is VS 2012, 10 is VS 2010, and 9 is VS 2008.

You can tell git-tfs to use a specific client library by setting the GIT_TFS_CLIENT environment variable to the version of Visual Studio you are using (e.g. 2010). If you set this in the Environment Variables control panel, then git-tfs will use the specified client library in all future cmd windows that you open. Don't forget to relaunch your console after setting the Environment Variable otherwise the old ones will be used.

The checkin policies need to be registered.

There are some cases where Visual Studio can find the checkin policy implementation, but git-tfs still can't. This can be solved by adding information about the checkin policy to the Windows registry. See #258 for a solution to this problem.

(Note: this may be caused by running git-tfs as a 32-bit executable on some 64-bit systems.)