Migration to RC of TFS success

Last week it was finally released, the first release candidate of team foundation server. I could nit wait to get my hands on the new bits and kept my browser pointed to the MSDN subscriptions page and refreshed it every 10 minutes or so. Finally just for going to bed I found that the bits had arrived and I downloaded it immediately. I burned a CD and took the bits to the office right the next morning. To be honest I wanted to upgrade our production server right away, but I decided to first upgrade my Virtual PC image I have. This image I use for giving training on team system and it was a great gunny pig to test my first TFS upgrade. I followed the Upgrade guide by the letter because I know from experience that missing one step in an installation or upgrade manual for TFS can lead you to disaster J. I was really impressed by the upgrade process, it took me less that one hour to complete on my VPC so that promised a good run for my production server. So I started to do the production server as well, but I must say that this server is running our custom process template and also has customized work item types and workflows. So I starter off running TFSUpgrade with the /verify flag and I got an error message. Hmm.. that was not what I was expecting, but after reading the message I thought I could solve that easily. The error message I was getting was the following:

Verify for CMMI Field name clash

ERROR: Found field names in Custom Methodlogies that will clash with new CMMI Methodlogy, please rename the following fields using WITFields.exe before proceeding – ;Severity

So what to do… simple just run WITFields.exe and rename the offending field. I think I just did not get enough sleep that day, because I tried to locate the tool, but did not find it. I must say I never used the tool before and I assumed it should be part of the upgrade kit I downloaded. Well it appears that WITFields.exe is a part of your standard installation and can be found at the following location :

<drive>Program FilesVisual Studio8Common7idePrivateAssemblies (for beta 3 refresh)

b.t.w. if you installed the RC you will find the tool is now located at a different location :

<drive>Program FilesVisual Studio8Common7ide

After renaming the offending field to the very intuitive Severity2, the upgrade went very smooth. J

One small glitch I encountered where the reports. When upgrading the server I ran the warehouse manually and it took about one hour to complete. When I looked at the reports I was not so happy because the showed totally wrong data. But half an hour later it showed the right results. I think it just takes a while for the data warehouse to settle and the reports to be correct. So if your reports don’t show up good the first time, just wait a little and the system might recover itself J

I must say I am impressed that it took me this little effort to get the server running on the RC bits. We are now running the bits since last week and I must say that I love the performance improvements that have been made. Also friendly names are now used in the work item assigned to fields.  And that is such a better experience than being named some funky name that I use to log on to windows.