Team Foundation Server: Default users
When creating a new project in Team Foundation Server a set of default permissions are applied. These are reasonably restrictive and for us, mean that our developers by default can't access the code. The idea is that you then go into the project settings and assign people access, but in our sort of business this is just a painful overhead.
To fix this you have to change the 'process template', which defines project setup. And thus, only applies to new projects, not existing ones.
To get to the template, you need to use Team Explorer in Visual Studio. On any project go to the Settings page and select "Process Template Manager".
From here you can Download the template you use (e.g. Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 2013.2). This will create a bunch of files and folders where you specify. You're interested in the Groups and Permissions\GroupsAndPermissions.xml file.
This is a basic XML file, you need to find the Contributors group and then look at the members node. By default we have @defaultTeam listed. So all we needed to do was to duplicate this line and change the name to the Active Directory name for our security group, e.g. MyDomain\All Developers.
Once that's saved you just need to Upload through the Template Manager and it'll overwrite your existing template.