The Windows Hosts File Just Saved My Skin

I had an issue today where a virtual machine couldn’t connect to our team foundation server. I had connected the client machine to the VPN, could ping by IP but not by hostname. I suspect it was to do with the fact that my VM is not part of the AD. I didn’t want to connect it to the AD because keeping a VM off the domain saves headaches. So after a few moments trying to think of a workaround I remembered the Windows Hosts file. I added an entry to map the IP for the TFS server to the domain name it should have and – voila – my visual studio solution was able to connect as normal. I’ve never ever used that file to do anything useful before, so this was a first.