Team Foundation Server (TFS) is bound to a some limitations that can potentially break your Visual Studio project. One of these limitations is the character count limit in a file path. If you overshoot this limit you will run into issue when adding new files to TFS or attempting to compile your project in Visual Studio. Here is a quick overview explaining why TFS behaves like this and what you can do about it.

When attempting to add a file to TFS or Visual Studio for compilation, you will be prompted with this error:

The specified path, file name, or both are too long. The fully qualified file name must be less than 260 characters, and the directory name must be less than 248 characters.

So why is this an issue? Surely modern operating systems should not be bound to these kinds of restrictions. After all, once you get past C:\Users[Username]\Documents\Projects... you have already eaten up 40 or so characters! This is an issue since TFS is apparently making non-unicode calls to create paths. When a program makes a non-unicode call, it will be limited to 260 characters for the path. This is not an issue with other programs that make a unicode call through the Windows API to create paths, as their limit is actually 32,767 characters.

So what can you do about this? The best thing to do is to shorten your base path. You can easily do this by moving your project from, say ‘My Documents’, to something along the lines of C:\Projects or C:\TFS

If you are really interested in the full technical details of this issue, you can visit MSDN for more information.