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We are just about to implement full blown TFS 2008 across our development team and I'd like to find out if there are any gotchas to b e aware fo or any installation issues I am likley to face. I have Googled all the obvious places and read the anti-panic blurb on the MS sites.

Currently we have ClearQuest, SourceSafe and Final Builder. It's my understanding that all of these can go once we implement TFS. If that's true it sounds pretty good already!

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You might get more response by asking this on stackoverflow.com –  Rowland Shaw Jul 3 '09 at 11:51
I have asked it on both :) –  user9553 Jul 3 '09 at 13:55
I dont; know why I am showngf as annonymous either. I have been on SO for months but it doesn;t seem to like me using the same account on here. –  user9553 Jul 3 '09 at 13:56
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4 Answers

We have also just started migrating away from sourcesafe and Bugtracker.NET to TFS. The install was fairly painless, except for a couple of pre-reqs I missed when I read through the install guide.
1) was that the data-tier needs to have analysis services in the same instance. Having waited for a kindly DBA to do the necessary (the data-tier is a clustered server and was already hosting production stuff), I then found that you could install with analysis services seperate, but only by using an answers file.
2) was silly of me, but I had forgotton to install reporting services on the app tier. Again an answers file will allow the reporting services install to be elsewhere.

The other thing was while I was migrating source safe. We have a lot of shared files in sourcesafe. I knew that TFS doesn't support sharing so we had already decided how we were going to deal with these shared projects. I then migrated then over to TFS but I didn't migrate them from the location in sourcesafe that they had originally been created in. The migration only took the history from the time of the share into that location. Which meant I had to delete that attempt and do it again, but pick the share of each project that had the most useful history on it.

Inspired by another answer on here, the security admin side is a bit confusing to start with. You have to seperatly control TFS, Sharepoint and SQL Reporting Services permissions. It doesn't help that this is my first experiance with the admin side of Sharepoint.

Team build has been slightly more frustrating. But we hadn't had a build server before, so there is some learning going on. I am currently trying to get database projects to build correctly, think I have got there, agian it was just sorting out the pre-reqs required. Some of visual studio, bit of SQL server, found a patch for the DBPro for team suite that means I don't need SQL server any more!

Nothing much else to report. Just getting used to how the TFS sourcecontrol works. So far it is WAY better than source safe. I haven't yet thought "why did it do that?" which was often on my mind when using Sourcesafe, particularly early on before I had learned its odd ways.

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We've been running it for a year and the program itself from an end-user perspective is fine. Source control through it, with Visual Studio is great.

The only real issue I've had is at times it can feel like a house of cards for the admin that is managing the stack it runs on. Moving from a one-tier stack to a two-tier stack is a bit of a nightmare, I really hope they make configuring the application easier in the next version.

I'd really recommend that you install it on SQL 2008 rather than trying to do an in-place upgrade as that looks like a bit of a nightmare and 2008 is a pre-req for the next version of TFS server from what I've heard.

My ultimate advice would be to get your stack that it runs on as solid as possible before you install TFS. We've moved it into a VM and it made life much easier for us, instead of a reinstall to get it onto bigger hardware we simply moved the VM.

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TFS 2010 Installation is one of the best yet. There is a new configuration manager that takes care of all the nigly configurations step by step. I am hoping to blog about it in the next 2 weeks. –  Diago Jul 8 '09 at 11:25
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Instalaltion is a nightmare. It took us two weeks to manage it.

The docs for installation suggest that you create 5! types of accounts and assign different roles and permission to them. We tried it on a virtual server several times from the scratch until we figured out how it should be done. The worst installation experience in my life.

When at work, it is still under suspicion that TFS looses some code when checked in, just like SourceSafe used to.

Otherwise nothing special. In our team we don't use many features of it, therefore I do not see any difference except for different icons on basically the same buttons. Yes, and it is much faster than SourceSafe.

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The TFS installation was extremely painful... I tried to use Windows Server 2008 with SQL Server 2008. It took 3 tries before I gave up (btw there are explicit step-by-step instructions on how to do this - it is not trivial).

Eventually I gave up and just let it do what it wanted... Windows Server 2003 with SQL Server 2005 and it was fine.

The install has put such a bad taste in my mouth, that we have not actually started using it yet.

I'd like to roshambo the devs that were responsible for the setup/installation. Worst install ever...

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