There are quite a number of questions on the forums related to connection issues with Team Foundation. Not that Team Foundation inherently has connection problems, I've never had any, but that it may not have been installed or configured it correctly or the environment could have changed. In this post I'll take a look at some of the common connection issues and make suggestions for the diagnosis and correction of these issues.

This list is by no means conclusive, so please send me your suggestions and comments.

Connectivity issues can cause the following errors:

• TF31002: Unable to connect to this Team Foundation Server
• TF31002: Unable to connect to TFS 2008
• TF30207: Error when creating a project

Ports

If you have a firewall or system protection software running on your local machine or on the network between you and TFS, that software may block ports needed by Team Foundation or Team Explorer. The default ports are as follows:

Changing these default ports may lead to connectivity loss with team Foundation, so changes should be made cautiously.

Note also that SharePoint, which contains the team project portals, runs on port 80 by default. If you try and set Team System Web Access to run on port 80 without using a host header, SharePoint will no longer be accessible, and you may receive the 'red X' in the document libraries folders Team Explorer.

Team Explorer

Make sure you have the latest version of the Team Explorer client installed. For instance, if you still have a beta version installed, you should install the RC version.

Web Services

Navigate to the Team Foundation server status web service from the server itself to ensure it is functioning properly:

http:// <servername>:8080/services/v1.0/serverstatus.asmx

If you can access the web service from the server, try accessing the same web service from the client machine.

Network

Try pinging the server using the full DNS name from the client. If this fails, you may need to update the DNS settings on the server, or flush your local DNS resolver cache:

ipconfig /flushdns

Machine.Config

If you are seeing the following error message, make sure the machine.config file is not corrupted:

Unhandled Exception: System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException: Configuration system failed to initialize

If it is, you may want to try copying the System.ServiceModel node from another machine.

Closing

If your problem wasn't solved here, or was solved by another method, please send suggestions, updates and questions for future updates to this post.