By now you must have heard about the new Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 release. There are plenty of blogs and videos that demonstrate the great functionality of both Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server. As of today it is available for everyone to download.

I was most curious about the TFS Basic configuration which gives you TFS version control and build on your local machine. The installation went pretty smooth: I used my sysprepped copy of Windows Server 2008 R2 and installed TFS Basic without additions. So the good thing is that you do not have to think about installing and configuring IIS or SQL Server (Express); the TFS Basic installation takes care of that. The installation is a breeze and only takes minutes and a reboot.

One error message I encountered when clicking the links in the installation summary was:

Server Error in '/tfs/web' Application.

Configuration Error

Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.
Parser Error Message: Could not load file or assembly 'System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Access\Web\web.config line 123)
Source Error:

Line 121:

Line 122:    <httpModules>

Line 123:      <add name="ScriptModule" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptModule, System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>

Line 124:      <add name="TSWAAuthentication" type="Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WebAccess.TSWAAuthenticationModule"/>

Line 125:    </httpModules>

Source File: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010\Application Tier\Web Access\Web\web.config    Line: 123

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.4927; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.4927

It turns out that the although the installation runs smooth, you do have to install .NET Framework 3.5 additionally.

… and the end of Visual SourceSafe. Brian Harry blogged about this recently. His post explains the early days of SourceSafe and the idea of bringing easy version control to developers. In the 3rd generation of Visual Studio Team System this concept returns in the form of TFS Basic. It is Team Foundation Server without components such as Windows Sharepoint Services and SQL Reporting Services but it does provide functionality for version control, builds and simple work items. The installation is supposed to be just 2 Gb and takes 20 minutes to complete. You can even install it on your laptop if you are doing a disconnected development project solo where you want to use version control. And if your TFS Basic is to be used by the entire organization, you can simply “reconfigure” the instance and make it a full-blown Team Foundation Server.

All of this will be publicly available in TFS 2010 Beta2, which is just around the corner. And since Beta2 can go-live you can actually have this functionality in the real world very soon.

Check out Brian’s post for more information.

If you are doing a Team Foundation Implementation or if you are running one, make sure you have these guides to make your life easier:

Installation guide – How to install TFS (in single or dual server setup), TFS build, TFS proxy and team explorer.

Administration guide - Administration concepts, procedures, and walkthroughs.

Operations guidance – When you realize that your ALM solution is business critical

TFS Guide - All about using your TFS and getting the most out of it

Here it is! Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 1 as well as .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 have been released to the public. Soma made the announcement of the release to MSDN on Monday, but now all the goods are available to everyone too.

We have been involved in the Technical Adoption Program since early 2008 and it has been a great ride. Lots of good information has been tried and shared and earlier this year the TAP partners presented on VSTS 2010 during the APO Conference.

The VSTS installation experience is pretty straightforward: When you start the setup, select to install VSTS 2010.

Click next.

Accept the license agreement.

Select the .NET Development Environment.

Optionally click the Customize button to select components to install.

Click Next to start the installation.

The setup prompts to restart your machine after the .NET Frameworks have been installed. And so it does again after the installation is complete.

And then your favorite development environment is ready to be used! Select your environment settings.

The new start page.

And the new layout for project and file types.

Oh, and I am sure you noticed the new user interface in Windows Presentation Foundation.

Except for the startup performance I love every bit of it.

Now we are looking forward to using VSTS and TFS in a managed production environment.

If you are a daily user of Team Foundation Server, I am sure you know the great TFS Power Tools that are released regularly by the product team. The latest version includes integration of Office Communicator Server in the Team Explorer. Check out the screenshot below: There is a new node in the Team Project tree that says Team Members, in which you can see groups and users that have access to a team project. Since I am logged in to Office Communicator, I can see the same availability indicators. When I right-click on a team member, I can have a video conversation or start a VOIP call and all other options that OCS offers. Great stuff!

For more info go to: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2008/10/01/preview-of-the-next-tfs-power-tools-release.aspx And to install the TFS Power Tools immediately you can download them from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=FBD14EEA-781F-45A1-8C46-9F6BA2F68BF0&displaylang=en.

Update: An entire community has started developing and sharing ideas around Team Members. The Skype extension sounds great. http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2008/11/13/extending-the-new-tfs-team-members-power-tool.aspx

Recently I ran into an error installing TFS2008 SP1. The environment is an upgraded TFS2005 install, had been running OK and updates went fine. This update just did not install.

Error 29106.Team Foundation Report Server Configuration: Access to the SQL Reporting Services databases could not be granted. Verify that the Team Foundation data-tier server has enough free disk space.

In the end the solution appeared in the log file, located in C:\WINDOWS\system32\config\systemprofile\Local Settings\Temp. The file stated

System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: User, group, or role 'Domain\TFS_AT$' already exists in the current database.

The solution appeared to be to remove the computer account from logins and all databases in SQL Server on the Team Foundation Server Data Tier. After that SP1 created the account again and installed fine.

In three weeks the first-ever public VSX Developer Conference will kick off. At the moment I am preparing my talk on TFS extensibility, primarily focused on partners who are creating marketable additions for TFS. If you want to attend, you still can: The fee is only $100...

There is a lot of stuff to tell and to demonstrate and so little time. The release of Service Pack 1 and the corresponding SDK have brought plenty interesting stuff:

VSExtensibilitySample: This new TFS sample provides an example of creating a Visual Studio add-in that interacts with the Version Control user interface of Team Explorer.  The sample comes with a detailed Word doc that provides insight into the requirements of such an add-in.

RichClientCustomControl: This new TFS sample provides an example of creating Work Item Tracking custom controls that work within Team Explorer.  The sample comes with a detailed Word doc that provides insight into the requirements of custom controls as well as a separate document that describes how to write custom controls that can be used within the Team Server Web Access environment.

How often do you search your development machine for code you developed before? Very often, right? And how often do you look for code on the web? Also very often, I assume. Search in Vista (or Windows Server 2008) are very powerful and so are the known search engines on the web.

So what if you wanted code that other people in your organisation created? That is where you can use Microsoft Search Server!

Search Server is based on Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 and has very simple yet powerful additions to search various content sources such as websites and file shares. To get started with searching the source code in your Team Foundation Server:

• Install Search Server
• Create a file share on a server
• Get the latest version of your TFS version control to the file share
• In Search Server Central Administration create a new content source and point it to the file share
• Add new file types, of files you want to search such as .cs, to the content index
• Start a full crawl on the content source

Now you are ready to go: Open the search page and enter something to search for such as "Page_Load". On the result page you will get links to the files in which your search string was found. Nice, right?

So next there can be loads of additions: You can create an integrated search within Visual Studio, apply effective TFS permissions, make search results open in Visual Studio, etc.

Last month has seen a lot of releases following the launch of Visual Studio 2008 and Team System http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2007/11/19/visual-studio-2008-and-net-framework-3-5-shipped.aspx , http://blogs.msdn.com/jeffbe/archive/2007/11/19/visual-studio-team-system-2008-ships.aspx

The story around VS SDK and Domain Specific Languages toolkit http://blogs.msdn.com/stuart_kent/archive/2007/11/22/what-s-new-for-dsl-tools-in-vs2008-vs2008-sdk.aspx

VSTS Web Access has made access to TFS so much easier for non-technicians http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/11/30/vsts-web-access-power-tool-for-team-system-2008-released.aspx

The ASP.NET extensions provide a Model-View-Controller framework and VS2008 Silverlight support amongst others http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/12/09/asp-net-3-5-extensions-ctp-preview-released.aspx

And finally today the upgraded power tools for Team Foundation Server have been released http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2007/12/21/december-07-release-of-the-tfs-power-tools-for-tfs-2008-are-available.aspx

If you are building .NET 2.0 applications, you really should take a look at all of the above.