How to change user credentials for TFS in Visual Studio

If you are developer and administrator in a TFS environment, a lot of times you find yourself switching between one user account to another. If you have configured TFS to use Windows Authentication then you find yourself in a situation where you are not able to switch to different user account. By default when you launch Visual Studio 2010 and connect to your team server it automatically picks up the last connected user account. I tried searching around in all TFS and Visual Studio options, I could not find anywhere where I could tell it to log off my existing account so I can enter new user credentials to connect. So here are the steps you will follow to log off existing user account from TFS and connect with new user account.

• Goto Start > Control Panel on your machine.

• Click on User Accounts or User Account and Family Safety, depending on your operating system and configuration.

• Now you should see UI that looks like below. Click on Credentials Manager.

  

• This will bring up a panel where all your credentials related to windows security are stored. Depending on your usage and connections to various windows securty connections you use and have used in the past you will find all the entries here. Following image shows how it looks on my machine.

  

• Click on the connection that you want to modify. It will expand and you will see an interface as shown below.

  

• Now click on Remove from vault. This will remove the credentials saved for that user account.
• Now launch Visual Studio 2010 instance and try to connect to team server. Select the URL of the team server from dropdown. Now when Visual Studio tried to connect using default credentials, it will fail and you will see following message. Click on Use different credentials link and it will bring up dialog box to enter new user account.