Ok, we recently brought up a Team Foundation Server at our hosting company and it’s been a bit of a chore. First, I tried to connect to the TFS without being on the same domain. The first time I connected it would prompt for a userid/password. After that initial prompt, which looked promising, it wouldn’t prompt again on future requests.  So that didn’t work. So I joined my laptop to the AD domain and got that part working – which is REALLY cool. Ok…. it doesn’t look any different than running within a VPC, but the idea is still really cool that I’m hitting my TFS over the Internet. I was doing a VSTS presentation at a local company last week and was able to hop on their public WIFI connection and connect VS up to my TFS – I didn’t have the guts to try and do my demo that way, but that could be happening soon. I have a Verizon wireless broadband card, and have this “vision” of doing a demo for people where I use that card to connect to TFS and look at work items, check out code, etc. The card has really fast download speeds, but the upload is very sluggish, so I’m not sure how realistic that idea is.

Now, back on topic, to get connected to TFS, I had to install Visual Studio Team Suite (beta 2) on my local laptop. While this goes against my own advice that I give people, I did it anyway. Just remember – do as I say, not as I do! My laptop hasn’t been formatted in a over a year and half, so it’s overdue and it’s been acting real flaky lately anyway. So I figure when I’m ready to get rid of VS2005, I’ll just rebuild the whole machine. VS2005 runs much faster locally than in the VPC, but I’ve started noticing a couple of things now that I’m not in a clean environment like a VPC.

1. MS anti-spyware breaks web and load tests. In order to run web and load tests, I had to turn off the spyware tool.
2. VS seems to blow up on me much more often- most recently while running load tests against a server, Visual Studio just gave up and shut down.
3. Interactions with TFS are slower – which you would probably expect. I’ve looked at some of the webservices traffic that flows, and it seems more chatty than I would have thought.  For instance, turning on the work item checkin policy is about 7 web service calls. That seemed a bit excessive to me. There also seems to be some sort of polling going on. I get regular hits on the web server, though I don’t know if that is from VS or something on TFS itself.

Anyway, I’ll post more info as we start using it more. I hope to get Dave and Omar using the same TFS soon as well, and we’ll move our code into it shortly and start “living the dream.”