Team Foundation Server 2010 Installation Experiences and Lessons Learned

Do it right the first time! 🙂

There’s quite a few posts on Team Foundation Server 2010 (TFS) and how to install and configure it, as well as a really good CHM file from Microsoft on the same topics, so I won’t go through duplicating what everyone else has done and will link to one at the bottom of this post.  I’m writing this just to relay the experience I had with getting the product configured just the way I wanted it, or some facsimile thereof and some lessons learned.

 

After viewing some videos on YouTube of TFS, reading some of the Microsoft marketing material, and some of the posts on it, I decided to stand up TFS in my environment to see how well it works and to explore changes since the last version.  Right now, the team I lead isn’t really using any ‘set’ collaborative product.  We tend to work in small teams on projects so the need isn’t really there, though I’m sure the organization wouldn’t hurt.  We’re currently using Subversion as our source repository and occasionally use MOSS or WSS to collaborate.  Otherwise it’s phone calls and emails since we also tend to bounce around the country.  Enough background, on to TFS installation…

After reading through a few blog posts and Microsoft’s documentation on how to install and configure TFS, I stood up a Windows Server 2008 R2 VM and installed SQL Server 2008.  I was going with a single server install.  I followed the documentation to the letter for a single server install, and everything worked out just fine.  WONDERFUL!  GREAT!  So far…

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Windows Server 2008 and Subversion over HTTPS

Here’s the scenario, I decided to try out Subversion as a source control repository on a Windows Server 2008 server, attached to a Win Server 2008 domain, with ISA Server forwarding HTTP traffic.  After doing a little bit of research, I decided to give VisualSVN Server a try.  If you don’t know it, it’s a very small footprint product produced by VisualSVN Limited, that installs Subversion and an Apache server, on Windows, to handle the HTTP connection to SVN (Subversion).

The product installed and configured very easily, ‘hats off’ to VisualSVN, and I was immediately able to connect to it from internal on my network.  There are a few self-explanatory questions that are posed in the installation wizard.  Tough things like where do you want to store your repositories. ;)  (If you’re going to use a file share as a repository, make sure that you use the UNC and not a mapped drive.)

I’m amazed that I’ve come across yet another tech product that is actually behaving as advertised.  Is it just me, or is that odd???

Not the fault of VisualSVN, I began to run into configuration issues when I tried to route the traffic through ISA Server.

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