Professional Team Foundation Server

15.1. Identifying the Challenges

The process of working in a distributed team is called geographically distributed development (GDD). Interesting challenges come up when you look at the cultures and approaches of each team. You may have a project that spans several geographies. Additionally, separate projects may be worked on in separate field offices. Other interesting issues that come up are development culture, language differences, process differences, and tools. To address these challenges, you have to look at each project and assess if they are good candidates for Team System. The features, elements, and components that can be distributed include:

• Team Foundation Server

• Branch office infrastructure

• Team portal

• Team Foundation Version Control

• Distributed load testing

• Team Foundation Build

Let's look at each one of these features and explore how they can be applied to a geographically distributed development environment.

15.1.1. Team Foundation Server over The WAN

For secure communication with Team Foundation Server, it is recommended that you access it using a virtual private network (VPN). Most of the applications that connect to Team Foundation Server use a series of Web services. In its release of the server, Microsoft directly supports Integrated Windows Authentication. The problem with Integrated Authentication is that it may not be able to connect through a proxy server (and many ISPs have implemented proxies). Firewalls may also pose a problem for the very same reason. ...