MSF, VSTS and TFS tales...

TweakUI is one of the command line utilities that are available using TFPT.EXE:

This tool allows to configure how Team Explorer 2008 connects to different Team Foundation Servers.

In the main window there are all the global options. The most useful one is the first option that allows to specify if Team Explorer automatically connects to the last TFS on startup. Changing this option is very useful when the PC is often used in disconnected scenarios, because it allows Team Explorer (and Visual Studio 2008) to start quickly.

With this Power Tool is also possible to create new connections to Team Foundation Server, or it's possible to configure existing connections:

It's possible to disable the auto reconnection only to specific servers (for example one can disable the connection to a CodePlex server, while maintaining the auto reconnection to a corporate server), and is also possible to put the server offline (one of the new feature of Team Explorer 2008 is the ability to work disconnected from Team Foundation Server and then being able to reconnect to it and resolve all the conflicts).

It's also possible to configure Team Explorer to use SSL to connect to the specific instance of TFS and eventually to use a client certificate to authenticate the client, instead of using NTLM or Basic Authentication.

For more information about configuring TFS to use SSL you can see this MSDN page. A step by step guide on enabling SSL on the server can be found here. For more information about mapping client certificates in IIS you can see this page on TechNet.

I wanted to be able to use the tool without starting it from command line. To do so, I added it to Visual Studio as an External Tool. I went to Tools->External Tools and configured the options like in this picture:

More details on the External Tools Dialog Box can be found on MSDN.

The final result is this:

At this point it's very easy to customize TFS Connection Settings without going to the command line.

As a side note, you can configure also Team Explorer 2005 to do not automatically reconnect to the latest TFS by setting the following registry key:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\TeamFoundation]

AutoLoadServer = 0 [DWORD]

The registry key for Team Explorer 2008 is the same, only with 9.0 before TeamFoundation.