Team Foundation Server 2010 Proxy – much like a traditional caching proxy server – improves network performance by saving local copies of source control files. As part of a new beta service we have launched Team Foundation Server 2010 Proxy to three regions for all of our customers. While we’ve had a presence in North America and Europe, I’m happy to announce our first step into Asia with our TFS Proxy server in Singapore.
Our main goal with the remote deployment of TFS Proxy is to enhance the user experience but we’re also extending our infrastructure using Amazon Web Services – where the Singapore server is located. It’s an exploratory venture and if it works, we would be able to extend our reach even further to other locations.
I’m sure the big question is: who does this benefit? It has the potential to help everyone! If you’re a one-person shop in Europe with a server that’s hosted at our North America data center, it will help. If your team is split into different countries, it will help.
If the server that you’re hosted on is already geographically near your location, then using TFS Proxy wouldn’t help – it could result in poorer performance – but if one of the nodes where we’re deploying a server is closer to you, you’ll definitely want to enable the service.
Team Foundation Server 2010 Proxy isn’t meant to replace your current server – it works in tandem with your existing TFS server. There are certain day-to-day features that will bypass TFS Proxy, mainly: work items, check-in/check-out, lock/unlock, shelving and checking the history of a file but the following will see huge improvements:
- Get
- Compare
- Annotate
I performed some general tests and the improvements are impressive.
I migrated a 7MB project that I had been working on to ETFS01 (our shared Team Foundation Server 2010 server in Europe) and then connected to our North American TFS Proxy. At first, there weren’t any performance-related improvements – since there isn’t any data that’s been cached, that was something I expected – but after the majority of my files had been cached, I was curious to see how much of a difference a full get of a project would take. Our office is fairly close to our North American data center so your mileage vary, but an uncached get to ETFS01 took about 42.1 seconds, the cached get took 7.6 – a huge difference! I was impressed.
By now this probably sounds like a sales pitch and you’re waiting for the “catch” – how much will you have to pay for this service?
Well, I’m not very good at sales — there’s a good reason why they keep me in support – but since this is a beta service, it’s absolutely free. If you want to evaluate TFS Proxy, access the Proxy Manager and enable a server. We don’t have automatic discovery feature enabled so use the instructions published in the following articles to configure your client:
- Configure Visual Studio 2010 to connect to your Team Foundation Server 2010 Proxy Server
- Configure Visual Studio 2008 to connect to your Team Foundation Server 2010 Proxy Server
- Configure Visual Studio 2005 to connect to your Team Foundation Server 2010 Proxy Server
If you haven’t established an account with us, you can sign-up for a 30-day free trial shared account.