So for the longest time I’ve complained about how unusable Blend for Visual Studio is on projects that use TFS, specifically instances of TFS that are on the other side of the internet (yes, I’m looking at you http://visualstudio.com) . The issue is that every time you try to modify a file it goes off to TFS to check something…. I’m not quite sure what, but it hangs for a couple of seconds before deciding that you’re ok to make the change. This is particularly bad when you’re working with sample data.
It turns out there is a stupidly simple fix – don’t let Blend access the internet. Due credit to Dave who works with me at Built to Roam as he was the one that told me to just create a firewall rule.
Now, it’d show you some pictures of how to create the firewall rule using MMC but for some reason MMC crashes for me when I go to view the outbound rules. Anyhow, here’s the command for doing it via the command line:
netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="Blend" dir=out action=block program="C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0BlendBlend.exe"
Blend will now complain when you first open a TFS connected project but there after it won’t miss a beat as you work with files as if there is no TFS connectivity.