Remote access to Team Foundation Server 2010

Question

We are four developers in different locations (in a 100 km radius of each other) tryint o collaborate on a software development project.

We would like to install Tea

Answer 1

@Nigel We have TFS on a remote server with local proxy at my workplace. Our internet connection is quite slow relative to the number of developers on site. TFS has extremely poor performance in this configuration compared to having the server local. Our solutions can be several hundred MB to download (of which there are a few branches). Checking version history is slow and painful. Retrieving shelvesets is slow and painful. Checking in on VS2010 or VS2008 is slow and painful. Fortunately VS2012 does this asynchronously so checking in is not so bad but you will eventually get a modal dialog when the op is complete.

All in all, I would say a poor experience compared to SVN let alone DVCS.

Answer 2

TFS is just a bunch of web services and should be set up for remote access out of the box.

Things you'll probably need to configure.

1. Make sure that the windows firewall is allowing TFS to accept incoming requests on port 8080 (the TFS install may do this for you)

2. Configure your router to use "Port Forwarding" so that requests from the internet to port 8080 are routed to the machine with TFS installed.

3. Your ISP probably allocates IP addresses dynamically so you might need to sign up for a Dynamic DNS service such as NO-IP.com. (check which ones are supported by your router)

Once you've done this then you should be up and running.

I'm sure others will suggest that you ditch TFS and use a DVCS such as GIT or Mercurial, they have a point! You should consider if it's worth the effort of getting TFS to work in this way when another system might be easier to get up and running.

Answer 3

you can use AnyDesk (version 5.2+) which allow you to set up TCP connection between clients.

I used it for connecting my client PC to a Team Foundation Server (TFS) over the internet. The server and client are behind NAT. I set the local and remote ports to '8080' and I can connect to server from client using this address on client: 'http://localhost:8080/tfs/'

Reference: TCP-Tunneling-AnyDesk

Answer 4

TFS works just fine for this type of scenario and whether you use a DVCS or not you're still going to have to configure access. You don't need to set up proxies. TFS is extremely fast even over a slow connection. The 3 things you need to remember if you're not on the same domain as the TFS are:

1. Have the TFS administrator set up your TFS rights using a domain account set up for you. If you don't have a domain account set one up and use it. If there's no domain then create a workgroup account or a local TFS server account.
2. Add your domain (or workgroup or local TFS server) account credentials manually to the Windows credential store or TFS will keep bugging you to login and that's a pain. Make sure you include the domain (or workgroup or local machine name) in the user name in this format: MyDomainOrMachineOrWorkgroup\MyUserName. No backslash at the beginning, no backslash at the end.
3. You need to either use the IP directly to connect or add an entry to your hosts file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts). For those that haven't ever gone into this file the "etc" is actually the directory name not just me saying "and so on". The entries there tell you that when you type an address like mytfs.mydomain.com it should go to IP such and such. That's all.