TFS Best Practice Analyzer failing with "%TFSServerURLValidated%

7th December 2013

I've been having trouble running the Team Foundation Server Best Practise Analyser (TfsBpa for short).

I’ve been having trouble running the Team Foundation Server Best Practise Analyser (TfsBpa for short). It was failing with the following warning:

Cannot validate the URL provided The scan was generated using the corrected URL “%TFSServerURLValidated%”.

I noticed in the “Other Reports” section that it listed the following additional errors:

23:03:07.351: Exception resetting Execution Policy in TFS PowerShell Object Processor: System.Management.Automation.CmdletInvocationException Access to the registry key ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell’ is denied. at System.Management.Automation.Internal.PipelineProcessor.SynchronousExecuteEnumerate(Object input, Hashtable errorResults, Boolean enumerate) at System.Management.Automation.PipelineNode.Execute(Array input, Pipe outputPipe, ArrayList& resultList, ExecutionContext context) at System.Management.Automation.StatementListNode.ExecuteStatement(ParseTreeNode statement, Array input, Pipe outputPipe, ArrayList& resultList, ExecutionContext context) System.Management.Automation Script

Hmm.. I wonder if it’s a problem related to PowerShell’s execution policy setting?

I ran the following in an elevated PowerShell prompt:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

And that’s fixed it – now the BPA process runs as expected. Yay!