Installing TFS 2010 on a SQL Instance

When installing Team Foundation Server 2010 on a SQL Instance today, I ran into a couple of issues that are related to the SQL Browser service.  If the SQL browser service is running, you only need to specify the server and instance name, as “sqlservername\instancename”.  If the browser service is not running, you should specify the server name and port number, as “sqlservername, portnumber”.  The value in the screenshot below did NOT work until I removed the “\tfs” value.

TFS Build Servers

By default TFS 2010 installs the build server with the fully qualified domain name as part of the path.  In our environment, this caused the build servers to be unreachable.  You can change this by going to TFS Admin Console on the build server, stop the build service, open the properties window, and remove the domain name from the path:

Configure Team Build 2010 to use a Proxy Server

If you want to set up the TFS 2010 Build server to use the TFS Proxy server, you’ll need to log in with the build account on the server and modify the registry with the following entries:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\TeamFoundation\SourceControl\Proxy]

"Enabled"="True"

"Url"="http://proxyservername:8081"

These entries are set when you use the Visual Studio UI to configure proxy usage, so if you have Visual Studio installed on the build server, you can configure it through the VS settings dialog.

Removing Source Control Provider in Visual Studio

I wanted to remove a source control provider from the list of providers that are listed in Visual Studio under Tools > Options without uninstalling the provider (because I needed the client for the history).  After poking around and reading the documentation on MSDN, on Windows 7 x64, the key is found under the location listed below.  Simply delete the provider under that registry key and it will no longer appear in Visual Studio.  This article helped me find this key.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\SourceCodeControlProvider\InstalledSCCProviders

If it is a non x64 machine, remove the Wow6432Node\ from the path.

TFS and Reporting Services Access Issue

After installing and configuring Team Foundation Server 2010 with Reporting Services, I was unable to access the Reporting Services instance from any other box besides the server itself, regardless of the account used (even the setup account was denied).  I would hit the host/reports site and would be prompted for a username and password and even when putting valid credentials in, the site would still deny me. The solution ended up being to remove the Windows Negotiate authentication option from the RSReportServer.config file.  This file is located at %Program Files%\Microsoft SQL Server\INSTANCENAME\Reporting Services\ReportServer.  Remove the RSWindowsNegotiate node under Authentication/AuthenticationTypes.

Migrating TFS 2008 from SQL 2005 to SQL 2008 (R2)

I have been tasked with upgrading our TFS 2008 instance to TFS 2010.  However, our current environment is a TFS 2008 dual-server deployment running on a SQL 2005 database server, and TFS 2010 requires SQL Server 2008.  In order to upgrade to TFS 2010, our current TFS 2008 instance must be migrated over to run against a SQL 2008 database server.

After quite a bit of searching and reading a variety documentation, I came to the conclusion that there doesn’t seem to be an official Microsoft document that describes this process.  The closest thing to this was the endorsement of this article by several of the TFS folks.  I highly recommend reading this article, as it is about 99% of what you’ll need to do in order to have a successful migration.

There is one gotcha that is very important or the process will fail when you try to move the TFS databases.  You must install a TFS 2008 with SP1 integrated on a separate (or same) server configured to point to the new SQL 2008 database server to “prep” the database server and make sure all the necessary TFS components, jobs, and security roles are set up correctly.

Thus, before starting the process as described in the article, first create a new TFS 2008 instance with the database on the SQL 2008 instance you will be migrating too.  Then you can begin following the instructions in the referenced article.

In addition, I unprovisioned WSS from the application tier server and re-provisioned it (by running the Sharepoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard), and then created a new web application on port 80, and then restored the content database and configured it to use the restored content database.  I wanted to move all WSS databases (Admin, Config, and Content) and simply moving the Content was not sufficient.  Note if you do this, you’ll probably need to reinstall the WSS extensions for TFS as the last step.

One final comment – we used SQL Server 2008 R2 and the migration worked fine.  Just make sure your TFS install has SP1 integrated.

Other links I found helpful:

• Moving TFS from hardware configuration to another
• Moving Sharepoint Content databases
• Rebuilding the Team System Cube
• Integrating TFS 2008 and TFS 2008 SP1 installs

VS Dark Themes

I am a big fan of dark themes for Visual Studio and came across the following article by Prabir that has dark themes for VS and others (such as Notepad++):

http://blog.prabir.me/post/My-Dark-Visual-Studio-Theme-Update.aspx