Force Visual Studio to think TFS is offline

Visual Studio 2008 introduced a feature that detects where the current Team Foundation Server is online or offline when you start the IDE.

In the situation where your server is actually ONLINE, but you want to treat it LIKE it’s offline, you have a couple of options.

Option 1 – Use the ‘tfpt tweakui’ utility

You can edit the server setting and go offline.

Close Visual Studio
Download and install the latest Team Foundation Power Tools
Start a Visual Studio Command Prompt
Type: tfpt tweakui
Open the server
Check the [X] Server is offline checkbox
Open Visual Studio

Option 2 – Yank the network cable before starting Visual Studio

Obviously the IDE won’t be able to contact the server, and will inform you that it is now offline.

Option 3 – Set a registry key

Create a *.reg file with the following text in it, and run it before starting Visual Studio.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\TeamFoundation\Servers\SERVERNAME]

"Offline"=dword:00000001

"AutoReconnect"=dword:00000000

When you want to go back online, you can either go to "File | Source Control | Go Online", or delete this registry key.

This entry was written by Grant Holliday, posted on June 1, 2008 at 7:14 pm, filed under Team Foundation Server. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

One Comment

Lorenzo Barbieri

Posted June 1, 2008 at 10:54 pm | Permalink

Option 3 – TFS TweakUI Power tool
You can edit the server and go offline: http://www.virtualspot.info/gdm_images/TFS2008PowerToolsTweakUI_CC50/image_4.png

Best,
Lorenzo

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By Arjan`s World » LINKBLOG for June 2, 2008 on June 3, 2008 at 6:56 am

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