You must use the Visual Studio Team Explorer 2012 (included in all Visual Studio editions or may be separately downloaded) to create a team project on a TFS 2012 server.  If you use VS 2010, you will get an error about not having permission.  The error message is very misleading, because it’s not a problem with your permissions.

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Microsoft Visual Studio
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TF30172: You do not have permission to create a new team project.
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