The (New) Smallest TFS Proxy

June 6, 2007

My coworker, Martin Woodward has been very pleased with himself lately about his world's smallest TFS proxy. Never one to back down from a challenge, I present the smaller than the world's smallest TFS proxy. It's running on a Mac Mini, which Martin assures me is (just slightly) smaller than his proxy.

The Proxy Server

Inevitably, someone else like me with an overblown competitive streak will come along and build a still smaller TFS proxy. Being as I'm a jerk, I've decided to hit a point that nobody else will match: this is the first TFS proxy server to run on a Mac.

When I say "run on a Mac", I don't mean that I've got a VM running Windows and Microsoft's TFS proxy server. That's too easy -- we've got a pint-sized TFS proxy actually running in MacOS X, thanks to Teamprise's new Java SDK for Team Foundation Server.

Fortunately, writing against the Teamprise SDK is easy. I didn't keep strict track, but I think that writing this little proxy server took about 10 hours, which probably broke down like:

  • 4 hours: figuring out the Jetty servlet framework (for hosting the proxy)
  • 2 hours: figuring out the hsqldb database framework (for caching)
  • 1 hour: lost to cigarette breaks
  • 2 hours: various other slacking
  • 1 hour: getting the files out of Team Foundation Server through our SDK

As you can see, our new SDK will let you very quickly one-up your coworkers. Isn't that really what software's all about?

If you're at TechEd, and want to see the (new) world's smallest TFS proxy, or the world's first TFS proxy on a Mac, swing by and say hi. Teamprise is at booth 1333.