Recently, I came across an issue where I had to change the size limit for WorkItem Attachments in TFS 2010. I searched all around the internet only to find very little information around it which wasn’t clear honestly.

So after breaking my head for sometime, I was successful in doing it. Here are my conclusions and the procedure to do it.

1. You DON’T 'have to' programmatically change it. You can do it directly from IIS webservices.

2. You CAN change it programmatically too, by making an entry into TFS Registry using a small piece of code.

Let me show you how it is done from IIS. This is to change the size of attachment to your required value for workItems in TFS 2010 for each collection individually.

1. You must be a TFS Admin to do this ( Login with setup account )
2. Browse to /WorkItemTracking/v1.0/ConfigurationSettingsService.asmx">/WorkItemTracking/v1.0/ConfigurationSettingsService.asmx">/WorkItemTracking/v1.0/ConfigurationSettingsService.asmx">http://localhost:8080/tfs/<YOUR-COLLECTION-NAME>/WorkItemTracking/v1.0/ConfigurationSettingsService.asmx
3. You’ll see 3 asmx services – GetMaxAttachmentSize, GetWorkItemTrackingVersion and SetMaxAttachmentSize.

4. To know what is the current value of the maximum attachment size for a collection, click on the first service and you’ll the current existing value for this particular collection when you click on ‘invoke’ button. ( value is in bytes )

5. Now click on the ‘SetMaxAttachmentSize’ webservice and fill in the value of your choice.

6. Reset IIS ( not required honestly, but I did it, just to be sure )

7. Now try attaching a file greater than the size you’ve set. It’ll fail successfully  

Below is the error which you’d see in such scenarios.

Let me know if you see any issues & I’ll be happy to help..!