Troubleshooting Team Foundation Server and IIS

Since about two weeks, I ran into all kinds of errors when working with Team Foundation Server 2010 using Visual Studio 2010. Whenever I tried to execute operations on a project level, such as updating to the latest version, getting a specific version, or checking in the entire project, I got all kinds of error messages. Checking in - or getting files - one by one seemed to work just fine.

Depending on the action I was trying to complete, the current phase of the moon, and whether or not I was wearing shoes that day, I was faced with a multitude of exceptions, including:

Multiple errors occurred during the operation, the first of which is displayed below. A full error list is available in the Output Window. C:\Projects\Project\File.aspx: The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a receive.

or

Team Foundation services are not available from server TFSServerName\DefaultCollection. Technical information (for administrator): The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a receive.

or

Multiple errors occurred during the operation, the first of which is displayed below. A full error list is available in the Output Window. C:\Projects\Project\File.aspx: TF30063: You are not authorized to access Microsoft-IIS/7.0.

Either way, I got multiple errors, connections were closed, I was or was not authorized to do what I wanted to do, and best of all, it was all very unexpected. Indeed....

I tried all kinds of things to resolve the issue. I rebooted the TFS server, rebooted my development machine, reloaded the project from TFS, logged into my development box using TFS Admin credentials and more, all to no avail.

The suddenly I realized something; I don't know why, but something just popped into my head. A few weeks ago, I had been experimenting with the The Dynamic IP Restrictions (DIPR) module for IIS 7.0. The ASP.NET security problem was getting lots of attention at that time (and a fix wasn't available yet), and I was looking into ways to mitigate the problem (not sure if it would have helped). What the DIPR does is keep track of the number of requests made in a certain timeframe. When the threshold is reached, the module starts throwing 401, 403 or 404 exceptions, or simply aborts the request (which is what I had configured). I had applied the module system-wide, so it was effective for all sites on my server, including the Team Foundation Server site that hosts the web services that TFS and VS use. And all of a sudden it made a lot of sense. Apparently, Visual Studio executes many requests per second (and rightfully so; updating a single project can easily mean updating hundreds of files; I don't like to wait, so VS tries to do that as fast as possible) and thus easily hits the threshold set by the module. That also explains why getting just a handful of files worked fine, while getting an entire project failed every single time.

I logged into my TFS server, disabled DIPR for the Team Foundation Server web site, and tried again. Voila: instant success. haven't seen the error anymore since I changed that setting.

Hope this helps someone....


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Date Posted 10/05/2010 18:41