TFS 2010 support offline clients. This means that you can continue to work although the TFS connection is not available. So if you start up VS and attempt to load a project contained in TFS and TFS cannot be found then VS will prompt you to work in offline mode.
There is only one problem: VS only does this when loading a solution. If TFS goes offline while a solution is already open though VS will not switch to offline mode. Instead it'll keep trying to connect to TFS and then time out. This is really inconvenient.
So how can we tell TFS to go offline without having to reopen Visual Studio?
I’m aware of 2 options:
- Through the tfpt command line utility in the TFS Power Tools
- Through the Visual Studio Go offline extension
TFPT.exe
- Open a Visual Studio 2010 command prompt
- Run tfpt.exe with the ‘tweakUI’ option
- Select the appropriate server and click Edit.
- In the server properties dialog, check the Server is offline checkbox and click OK.
- Now VS is in offline mode. This takes effect immediately (even if VS is already open).
Go offline extension
- In Visual Studio go to File –> Source Control.
- An extra Go Offline button should show up.
Remark: TFS 11 and VS 11 will support a far better model to work offline.