TFS Repository Access Using TFVC from 3rd Party

Question

Got kind of a unique situation of which I am sure that you have covered or have been asked before. We have TFS2018 on premise with a developer staff who has access to our code repository with their Visual Studio MSDN license’s that we pay for. Over the course of the last few weeks, we have the need to job out some work for a certain part of our system to a 3rd party consulting company. This company (call it Company A) has their own licenses under their own company, but now needs access to our code repository on premise. I have complete control as an admin for TFS, so I have limited their code access in TFS to a single collection via local AD accounts that we have set up for them.

Problem resides in the fact that no matter what I have tried I cannot get them to connect to our repository via Visual Studio (2019), team explorer. I have even gone as so far to set up a proxy in TFS. Through the web portal all is fine, in the fact that they can only see their collection and view the source code there. Any thoughts or guidance on how to get their VS licenses (separate from ours – Company A) to communicate with our repository. I know there must be some way to map their Azure or VS accounts to ours, just have had no experience with that. Our internal infrastructure staff, is willing to do or try anything as long as there are no internal security concerns. We will probably be doing more of this in the future, so getting our hands around what is required will be imperative moving forward.

Any thoughts or guidance would be appreciated.

NOTE: our internal network team has verified that our public facing site tfw.sekoww.com has outside access, VS is refusing these connections.

Answer 1

@Michael Mlachak Thanks for reaching out. Azure DevOps and its services are not supported on the Microsoft Q&A platform. Please post your question in the following forum where the Azure DevOps team and DevOps community are actively answering questions: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/spaces/21/index.html