Posts under ‘Team Foundation Server’

Last week I installed TFS 2010 at home and I have to say it was a truly pleasant experience. Now I realise that for any non-geeks you may be thinking a) What the heck is TFS and b) This guy is weird, he gets aroused by technology.

Ok, aroused might be pushing it somewhat but happy definitely.

Secondly, I have had emails from 1000′s of non-geeks today (ok my wife asked me) what TFS stands for. TFS is Team Foundation Server. Ok, that’s doesn’t tell you much more either does TFS is used to manage the development lifecycle for a team of developers: It handles things like source control (kind of like filing on steroids for code), task managements (think To Do List on even more steroids) and build management (take all the files and assemble them, sprinkle with magic dust and create me a web site) amongst other things. And all this is co-ordinated by TFS for a team of 1,2… 100′s, possibly 1000′s of developers.

Anyone that has installed and configured TFS 2005/2008 will know that it is a BIG job and fraught with gotchas. I am happy to say that the gotchas I came across in the past are No More. Extinct. Dead as a Dodo (to quote John Cleese)

Gotcha Number 1.

“You cannot install TFS on a 64bit OS and if you want the SQL Server to be 2008 your in for some hard work.”

This is not so with TFS 2010. Installation on a 64bit OS with a 64bit database was smooth and trouble free.

Gotcha Number 2.

“TFS requires a copy of Windows Server.”

Nope! not anymore. You can install (and I have) no problem on Windows 7. I installed on Windows 7 64 bit running SQL Server 2008 64 bit edition and once again the install was smooth as silk.

Gotcha Number 3.

“Installing TFS is fiddly and requires a lot of different steps, some requiring manual configuration.”

Could not be further from the truth now. The installation was done from start to end with 1 installation package requiring no manual modifications at all. In fact installing TFS 2010 + the build agent + Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate (this of course is an additional install) took me under 1 hour to do. Microsoft you have listened and you have done us developers proud. Well done.

These are my personal experiences installing TFS 2010 having previously deployed and configured TFS 2008 on a 32bit OS with a 64Bit version of SQL Server.

I am now happily migrating my source code across to TSF 2010 leaving some projects that I still need to support in Visual Studio 2008 and newer ones I am converting to Visual Studio 2010. Working in either Visual Studio 2008 or 2010 works equally well against TFS 2010 I am happy to report.

No doubt once I delve further in to the product itself I will be writing further posts on my findings with TFS 2010.

BondiGeek