Custom Response Header For Our TFS 2010 App Tier Farm

I’m curious to see if people think this is a good idea or not. In our TFS 2010 farm we have four application servers. In the process of testing load balancing and fail over, I was having trouble trying to figure out which box my requests were going to. Our load balancer sets a cookie so we persist to the same App Tier machine, but it’s an obfuscated value that no one seems to be able to provide any insight into how to un-obfuscate it. (And I’m not sure if devenv.exe is passing that cookie as we seem to be bouncing across all four App Tiers when doing things like “Get.” Not a big deal, but it would be nice if there was a way to persist.)

To help me out, I set a custom response header called “x-tfs-machine” that resolves the name of the App Tier machine. Via Fiddler or Wireshark, I know can inspect what App Tier I’m hitting. It seems to be working quite well for me.

While I’m just using this for testing, I’m thinking about leaving it on when we go live so we can see what server a user is hitting if they are running into issues.

Our TFS 2010 Topology

Grant Holiday (a blog I highly recommend) posted DevDiv’s 2010 hardware topology. Oddly enough, our proposed solution looks much the same.

With TFS 2008, we’re currently making use of F5’s Big/Ip for controlling access to our primary and standby server. We switch between the two during failover situations. With 2010 we’ll be enabling Round Robin and opening up load balancing between 4 VMs running the TFS 2010 App Tier on 2008 Server R2.

Moreover, like DevDiv, we’re taking the opportunity to break out our Warehouse and Analysis Services to a separate server. Our plan is to run an Active/Active cluster. Active Node 1 will run things like TFS_Configuration while Active Node 2 will run the Tfs_Warehouse and Reporting Services databases. If we have hardware failure, we’ll have a single Node running both while the failed node is repaired. We were thinking of doing a 3-node Active/Active/Passive cluster, but the data center didn’t feel comfortable with that because they don’t currently support that configuration.

Let me know what you think of our solution.

Contents of a Changeset when Accessing via a Work Item Link

UPDATE: I'm smoking crack. There is a slight change to the use case below. I left the original use case in there for an example of what works fine. The behavior I was seeing works the same in both VS 2008 and VS 2010. Sorry for the trouble of this post.

Using Visual Studio 2010 connecting to a TFS 2008 Server I can’t seem to get the nice dialog box to look at the contents of a Changeset that is linked to a Work Item. When I double click on it, I get a IE window that shows the contents in an HTML page, but I don’t have a dialog open up where I can do things like Right Click and compare to Previous Version. This is annoying as I use this feature all the time for code reviews and bug fix approvals.

I tried putting on TFS 2010 Power Tools, but this too did not give me the option. Tomorrow I’ll try to connect to a TFS 2010 Server instance to see if that changes the behavior. We have a number of people that use this procedure for code reviews and I can see some upset faces if we don’t have a better solution. Here is the exact use case again:


1) Open a Work Item
2) Click on Links
3) Double Click on Changeset.
4) This opens IE with the contents instead of a dialog box.


1) View History on a file in Source Control
2) Double Click on Changeset
3) Click on Work Item
4) Click on Links
5) Double Click on Changeset
6) Here is where I get IE popping up.

Oddly, I get the Changeset dialog box fine when I go directly to a Work Item to the linked Changeset. It's when I got to a Changeset to a Work Item to its linked Changesets that I get IE popping up.

Again, in VS 2008 this would give you a dialog box where you can do things like compare to previous version. In VS 2010, this seems to give me only a popup to IE.

Maybe I’m missing something? Yes you are Mac. This works the same in VS 2008 and VS 2010.

Connecting Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to TFS 2010 RC

After my colleague installed TFS 2010 RC to our DEV system, I mustered up the courage to try and connect via Visual Studio 2008 SP1. Not much luck starting out.

I don’t remember the exact error, but it was something in regards to "Unable To Connect." Thanks for letting me know.

After reading through a few blogs and discussion boards (most of them referenced the need for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 which I already had), I came across this one which at the bottom shows you a registry edit you can make to add the TFS 2010 to your VS 2008 SP1 server list. After trying this, I got a bit farther and finally a meaningfully error message.

When trying to connect, we got "You Must Update Your Client with the Forward Compatibility Update.." I couldn't copy/paste the link in the dialog window (sigh), so I got out my pencil and paper to write it down. Here it is for you so you don't have to repeat the same archaic steps.

After installing this package, I was able to connect by putting in http://$server-name:8080/tfs/$collection-name