Installing Team Foundation Server Beta 3, Wahoo what a rush

Really unbelievable, the team system team did a really great job on making Installation a lot easier. After downloading the Beta 3 bits already this weekend, I did not get the time to install yet until last night. I got an email from our datacenter guys that the Team Foundation server hardware was setup and ready to use for me. Just before I wanted to go to sleep, I just got this itch that I wanted to setup the server first, so I could spend the next day experimenting with the new server in stead of working whole day on installing. So I setup a remote connection to the server and started my installation. I ran into a interesting new feature from the SQL server team, they split up the iso image into a server part and a tools & online books part. As always I installed everything from SQL server and got a prompt to insert Disk 2. Luckily Brad already blogged about this issue so I browsed to the Universal download site at MSDN and downloaded the other iso image as well. I was able to switch the disks and finish the SQL installation without errors.

Because I now got real hardware for my TFS setup (a nice dual proc Xenon with 6GB memory and raid disks especially setup for SQL server) I decided to change SQL server default file location setting so TFS setup would(I presumed) install the databases on the correct drive. (the drive that is realy fast) I started the TFS setup and choose for a single server setup.

Then I got a new dialog in front of me that saved my many hours and is really great. The setup team created a dialog that verifies the server setup and detects any problems that might fail the installation. Now that Rocks! I got the error message that the SQL Server Browser service was not running and that could have failed the installation. So I turned the service on and set it to automatic and setup finished without any hiccups. There I was, running Team Foundation server Beta 3 within 2 hours! (From which I needed 90 % of the time setting up SQL server and Share point and downloading the second ISO for SQL) Now this is a major improvement and I want to say thanks to the team making this such a better experience then in the past. I think this will solve many of the forum posted issues as well.

One thing that I noticed is that the setup did not use the SQLserver settings for new databases.(and I reported this as a bug) So I needed to move the database files (and log files) to another disk. I stopped the TFSSServerScheduler service and then detached all tfs databases. I moved them over to the fast disks and attached them again. Started the TFSServerScheduler again and am now up and running to give the server a real spin. I will try to get my new work item types imported into the project and then we can start using it as our production environment.

I will keep you posted on our findings