One of the clients has tightened up their web proxy so much that Visual Studio 2010 does not want to connect to the HTTP 8080 port on the external TFS server (yes, I will switch to HTTPS if the workaround appears stable enough).
The problem is that Visual Studio often just tells you it cannot connect. No further error details.
Well, after you get most things working, you get this error every now and then:
[Microsoft Visual Studio]
Error
Team Foundation services are not available from server tfs.some-domain\PREFIX.
Technical information (for administrator):
HTTP code 407: Proxy Authentication Required
[OK]
There are a few problems involved:
- Visual Studio does not allow you to enter credentials for the Proxy server.
- Visual Studio doesn’t fully use the proxy settings from Internet Explorer either.
- Visual Studio (unlike Internet Explorer) seems to loose the proxy session and or proxy authentication for that session over time.
All in all, it is fishy, even editing the devenv.exe.config proxy settings didn’t work (maybe I haven’t found the right combination of settings yet: that’s part of the research I need to do).
Workaround
So far, these are the current workaround steps (I will post a new entry when I found the solution or shortened the steps).
The workaround includes HTTP Fiddler, and sometimes doesn’t work without. HTTP Fiddler helps anyway as it shows the HTTP traffic (including error messages from the proxy server) between Visual Studio and TFS. Read the rest of this entry »
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