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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Tutorial: Creating A MOSS Development Environment Part IV – Configuring MOSS

Ok, this is the last entry in this series of tutorials for setting up a MOSS development environment.  In the prior posts, we installed SQL Server, installed MOSS, installed VS.NET and some other supporting products, and in this post, we’ll configure MOSS.  The plan for this configuration is to go through the basic farm configuration with assigning roles to our server and setting up a web application.  As an additional task, we’ll extend the web application that we create and configure it for secure (https) access.  I’ve discovered that in most deployments, clients are looking for secure websites, so it makes sense to develop on one whenever possible.

Here are the links to the prior posts in this series:

Tutorial: Creating A MOSS Development Environment Part I – SQL Server Installation
Tutorial: Creating A MOSS Development Environment Part II – MOSS Installation
Tutorial: Creating A MOSS Development Environment Part III – VS.NET Installation

Prework

There are a few things that we’ll need to do as prework for completing this tutorial.  Create the following accounts:

WssSearchService (we’ll use this account for all of SharePoint’s search functionality)
SpsContentAccess (used for the content access account for indexing)
MainAppPool (we’ll use this for the app pool account)
MossSspAccount (will be used for the SSP application pool)
MossWebApp01 (will be used for the main web application)

Tutorial: Creating A MOSS Development Environment Part III – VS.NET Installation

Welcome back and onto part III of this installation guide.  This installment will document installing Visual Studio .NET 2008 and also discuss the additional software that is advised to facilitate MOSS development.

Parts one and two can be found here:

Tutorial: Creating A MOSS Development Environment Part I – SQL Server Installation
Tutorial: Creating A MOSS Development Environment Part II – MOSS Installation

If you’re following along, great, and if you’re just coming across this entry because you wanted a sample of the software to install in the environment to facilitate development, that’s great too.  I hope this entry helps.  Installing Visual Studio .NET is pretty straight forward, the only thing I do different than the standard install is change the installation path, and remove SQL Express since we installed that during step one, so before I move onto documenting that, I’ll list the software that I add to development environments.

Software to add to your MOSS Development Environments

BDC Metadata Manager
Fiddler HTTP Debugger
Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar
Lutz Roeder’s .NET Reflector
PowerShell
Microsoft Office 2007
SharePoint Designer
Visual Studio 2008 Extensions for Windows SharePoint Services (VSeWSS)
Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System (VSTO)
WSS 3.0 SDK
MOSS 2007 SDK

From the above software list, everything is either included with your MSDN License (hopefully you have one) or available as a free download, with the exception of BDC Metadata Manager.  However for BDC Meta Man, you can download a light-weight free version of the product that will allow you demonstrate functionality.