Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2
Dec 12 2009
Since yesterday, MSDN subscribers are able to download Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. I’m really excited about this release! Lots of important improvements in different areas of software development practices. I’m looking forward to further test and evaluate this release …
Today I did install already a Hyper-V image with a full blown Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2. Installation was absolutely flawless! First I installed IIS 7.0 and SQL Server 2008 on Windows Server 2008 R2. After that I was able to start the setup wizard of Team Foundation Server 2010 that’s now split into an installation part and a configuration part. The first part only copies the required files to the server while the second part takes care of the configuration. I did choose for the Standard Single Server wizard which guided me towards an easy and understandable configuration of the different TFS components. Thank you guys for keeping it simple! Other wizards are provided for more complex scenarios.
What I extremely like is the TFS Administration Console that pops up after closing the configuration wizard! It gives you a nice overview of what’s installed and you can control the project collections, build controllers, service accounts, … A lot of stuff that was managed via the command line in previous versions of Team Foundation Server. Good stuff! This Administration Console will probably evolve even more in the future.
You can start it now manually via Start > Programs (I do remember that with Beta 1 it was a snap-in for Microsoft Management Console).
So, that leaves me to install Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Beta 2 for starting up a first development project. Note that Team Explorer is now part of the Visual Studio client edition and doesn’t need to be installed separately. Every Visual Studio edition will have a Team Explorer to connect to a Team Foundation Server. Very good!
You might have noticed that Team System did not come up once in this post up till now. I need to recover from the first shock, but the Team System moniker will eventually disappear. Back to the Visual Studio brand! I do not want to go deeper into this holy discussion but I assume there might be good reasons to take this drastic decision. In the end the decrease of different Visual Studio editions should make it more clear for all type of stakeholders. Agree or not … we will have to live with it! The decision has been made!
• VS 2010 Professional
• VS 2010 Premium
• VS 2010 Ultimate
Read more about the different editions here. The Ultimate Edition will contain *everything*, including IntelliTrace (Historical Debugger) and the Test and Lab Manager which won’t be part of the Premium edition.
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Hypervisor not running?!
August 12, 2009
I’m running a dual boot (Win7 / Win2008) on my laptop and after I installed Windows 7 RTM this week-end, the boot configuration was messed up and I had to execute a repair to get Windows Server 2008 back in my boot menu. But apparently these boot configuration changes caused also Hyper-V to stop working : “virtual machine could not be started because the hypervisor is not running”.
To add the hypervisor auto launch back into the BCD store you’ll need to run the following command in administrator mode
bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype auto
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Connecting to TFS2010 from VSTS2008
In a previous post I explained my system setup with Hyper-V running 2 images with TFS2008 and TFS2010. Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite was also installed on the main operating system to be able to connect to TFS2008 and TFS2010 at the same time. Connecting to TFS2010 is a bit awkward becaused you need to supply the full url with the name of the tfs instance while normally you must only supply the TFS server name for connecting to TFS2008.
When adding a server in VSTS2010, it’s back to basics …
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No connection to TFS2010 beta 1
July 28, 2009
As explained in my previous post, I’m running Hyper-V on my laptop with a virtual image for Team Foundation Server 2010 beta 1. Each time I shut down my main operating system and restart it the next day to connect back to my TFS2010 image, I get the same error when starting Visual Studio 2010 : error TF205020.
Afterwards when I wanted to connect to TFS via Team Explorer I was faced with error TF31001 …
Other MVP Team System colleagues had similar errors and they also had a TFS2010 installation on a solid state hard disk (SSD). Resetting IIS (iisreset) did the magic and brought all TFS services back online like nothing happened. For now I have a quick workaround, but I’m curious what’s causing this and how it can be resolved. Hoping to bring you more news soon!
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I have setup a dual boot with Windows 7 (really nice and fast install experience!) and Windows Server 2008. In the Windows Server 2008 operating system, Hyper-V is used to manage different virtual machines. For the moment I’ve created already two virtual machines :
1. Team Foundation Server 2008 (workgroup edition)
2. Team Foundation Server 2010 (Beta 1)
Instead of using a prepared TFS2008 virtual machine, I’ve decided to install and configure Team Foundation Server 2008 from scratch because I wanted to experience the difference(s) later with the installation procedure of Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 1. I have installed TFS2008 a few times in the past but it stays a pretty cautious task. The one and only rule is to stick to the latest version of the TFS2008 installation guide. This is a list of the software that got installed already on the TFS2008 “All-Up” virtual image (app + data tier) :
• Windows Server 2008 R2 with WSS3.0 and IIS7
• TFS2008 (SP1) with SQL Server 2008
• Team Build
• Team Explorer + VSTS Team Suite 2008 (SP1)
• Team Foundation Server Power Tools
After that it was finally time to put my hands on the Beta 1 bits of Team Foundation Server 2010. Installation guidelines for TFS2010 can be found here and some more helpful instructions here.
It’s clear from the start that the TFS Team put a lot of attention to the installation process. Installation is now separated from the actual configuration of the Team Foundation Server. In the first phase the software is copied to the server and some basic registration takes place. After this you get the option to configure TFS in a new configuration wizard where you can choose between a default and a custom configuration. The benefit of this new separated installation process is that the configuration phase can be completed one piece at a time without ever rolling back the first phase. I didn’t take screenshots during the installation process, but you can find most of the screenshots in this blogpost of Brian Harry. For sure, it’s a big improvement and I feel more in control during the setup.
More TFS2010 news to come!
Other interesting impressions :
• Solid State rocks!
• The Windows 7 experience is great as well! No big issues so far … it feels good! Also the ability to mount .vhd files comes in handy.
• My laptop has also a built-in eSATA port and I’m still looking for an external hard drive with an eSATA interface for extra storage. Any suggestions? What about storing virtual images on external drives? What type of external drives should I look for?
• 14.1″ for my laptop screen has been the right choice
• My IT Pro knowledge (Windows Server 2008 features/roles, Hyper-V, virtual networks, …) got a good upgrade during my holidays. What would I do without a connection to the Internet to set this all up. I also found a very good article on turning a Windows Server operating system into a workstation (link via Cameron Skinner).
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TFS with FQDN
A fully qualified domain name (or FQDN) is an unambiguous domain name that specifies the exact location in the Domain Name System’s tree hierarchy through to a top-level domain and finally to the root domain. Technically, a FQDN has a trailing dot (for example: somehost.example.com.), but most DNS resolvers will treat any domain name that already has a dot as being an FQDN and add the final dot needed for the root of the DNS tree.
A lot of companies will use FQDN what means that Team Foundation Server won’t work with the default installation procedure. At first sight, you might think it works, but for Windows SharePoint Services and Reporting Services it won’t! There’s a pretty good blogpost from Buck Hodges available that guides you how to modify the default TFS configuration. Here’s what I did to get TFS working with FQDN :
• Run tfsadminutil activateat MyFQDN. This command (tfsadminutil can be found in the Tools folder of the TFS installation folder) will activate the FQDN computer as the TFS application-tier server. One of the executed tasks is the modification of the global TFS web.config (config file can be found in the Web Services folder of the TFS installation folder). You may verify the TFSNameUrl setting in the configuration file. I also manually added the appsetting TfsUrlPublic with as value the http://*FQDN*:8080 to force FQDN references in e-mail notifications. Another task the command does is changing the TFS service interface. You may verify this in the tbl_service_interface table of the TfsIntegration database. All urls should now match the FQDN. Before all urls contained the netbiosname of the computer.
• Update registry settings BaseReportsUrl and ReportsService with my FQDN at HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\TeamFoundation\ReportServer\80\Sites.
• For WSS 3.0 to work with TFS 2008, I still had to add an alternate access mapping (see blogpost Buck Hodges how to cope with that).
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