TF30177 - "The operation has timed out"

Following the deployment of TFS 2012 Update 2, its taken me some effort to track down a time-out issue when creating new projects. Below is a solution that I used to fix this issue. I only experienced this error when creating new projects, however it may effect slow connections when using VS as well.

Environment: I am working on a remote site with a latency of >350ms to the servers through a VPN. Furthermore to connect through to the internet there is a proxy. Error: When I try and create a new project I am thrown the following error message after about 3 minutes: TF30177: Team Project Creation Failed with an explanation of "The operation has timed out". Before the upgrade to Update 2, I was able to create Projects without issues even with the latency.

To begin with I thought I had found the solution with a MS Hotfix KB981898, however it does not apply to Server 2008 R2 SP1. Working on the same line, that IIS was prematurely expiring the connection, I did some digging on how to increase the timeouts for HTTPS.

Following posts from Jeff Widmers' Blog and an eFreedom Post, I started to increase timeouts in IIS. I found the sweet spot with the following 2 places. Firstly the Ping Maximum Response Time (second) to 600 and secondly the system.web\httpRuntime \| executionTimeout to 00:10:00 all within IIS. Below is a simple step by step to get to these settings.

Logon to the Application Tier for Team Foundation Server Update 2. Open the IIS Manager.
Single left click on the Application Tier name. Over in the features pane, select Configuration Editor
Find the Section: system.web/httpRuntime
Find the setting executionTimeOut set the time to 00:10:00
Apply the changes, by selecting Apply in the Action column to the right.

For the second setting. Single left click on the Application Pools.
Right click on the "Microsoft Team Foundation Server Application Pool" and select Advanced Settings...
Find the setting Ping Maximum Response Time (seconds) and set the time out to 600.
Click Okay

Finally for the settings to be used perform an IISReset

Additional Notes
I set the time-out to 600 seconds because of the times shown in the VSTS_TeamProjectCreation Log created on the client. On a successful project creation the total time was 529 seconds for a clean Scrum 2.2 template. Your environments may need more or less depending on latency and process templates.