.Net Jonesie - TFS RC Upgrade Fun

Monday, February 13, 2006

Here's a few notes and tips from my TFS Server Upgrade experience.

Make sure you get the upgrade kit and read the instructions cover to cover before starting.
You'll also need the updated install guide. But be warned, you may not be able to view the contents of this. See my rant in a previous post.
The upgrade guide is 43 pages long, but don't panic. You can ignore some of this. I have a single server install so I ignored the dual server upgrade instructions.
Read Rob Caron's blog. There's a few links there to other peoples upgrade experience.
During the upgrade you need to create and delete Team Projects. I found that TFSDeleteProject would not work on my client machine. It kept telling me it could not find the server. I suspect this was due to my TFS permissions or something funcky with our domain/AD setup. I copied TFSDeleteProject to the server and, using remote desktop, logged in using the TFSService account and it then worked just fine.
You need to uninstall Beta 3 during the upgrade. I have the Team Test Load Controller on our single server so I uninstalled that first just to be safe. I didn't have Team Explorer on the TFS server so I didn't need to uninstall this.
After you install the TFS RC, you need to execute a web service method on http://localhost:8080/services/v1.0/Registration.asmx and verify that the returned XML is correct. This seems daft to me. It should be something that is built into the install.
To upgrade the build types, you have to run the upgrade tool TFSBuildUpgrade on a machine that has the Team Explorer installed. I didn't have this installed on my TF Server so I tried to run this on my build server but I got the same error as TFSDeleteProject - it could not see the TFS Server. So, I installed the Team Explorer on the TF Server and ran the upgrade there without issue.
You have to install the Team Explorer on client machines. This sounds obvious but when you are working through the upgrade instructions it's not easy to spot when you should do this. You should do it after you have installed all the servers. If you try to use Visual Studio with the Beta explorer (like I did) it won't work.

The installation took me about 2.5 hours but I was very careful - this is a production system. I would expect a full install from scratch (including SQL & Sharepoint Services) would take about the same time - maybe a little longer. Overall, this was a pretty painless process and I think is more than good enough for a Version 1 product - at least for a single server install. I'm being deliberatly cautious in my praise here as I have installed TFS a few times already. Someone installing for the first time may not find it as easy as I did.

I haven't had much time to play with the client yet, but here's a couple of things I noticed.

The Security & Permissions dialogs include some more informational tips:

This is a nice reminder for people.
User names are now displayed instead of login names:
Reports are tidier and much more complete.

Now back to more boring work...

Monday, February 13, 2006 1:52:03 PM (New Zealand Daylight Time, UTC+13:00)

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