TFS Beta 3 System Health Check

Anyone who has tried to install early versions (Betas and CTPs) of Team Foundation Server will undoubtedly be familiar with Error 32000 and a hand full of others that were all too common. A scan back through the forums over the past year will confirm that setup and installation issues have been the main gripe for early testers eager to have a look at TFS.

A quick look at the Microsoft Technical Forum on Visual Studio Team System shows the following interesting statistics;

(Shown in order of most active to least active, effective as at 14th October 2005)
  • Visual Studio Team Foundation (3,198 posts)
    • Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Setup & Administration (1,842 posts)
      • Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Architects (1,319 posts)
        • Visual Studio Team System General (1,220 posts)
          • Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Developers (585 posts)
            • Domain-Specific Language Tools (485 posts)
              • Microsoft Solutions Framework – MSF (306 posts)
                • Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Architects (252 posts)
                  • Visual Studio Team System Workshop (13 posts)</UL> The second most active topic is around TFS Setup & Administration and a quick look at the posts in the most active topic reveals that many of those are in fact issues with setup which have not be posted to the correct topic.

                  Now the good news

                  As part of the setup for Team Foundation Server Beta 3, Microsoft now include a System Health Check which is designed to try to anticipate any problems or issues you may experience before you continue with setup. Hip Hip Hooray!

                  If any problems are detected, a dialog box appears (shown below) allowing you to click a hyperlink and review the details of the system scan.

                  TFS System Check UI

                  The only problems I faced when installing TFS B3 onto my virtual machine were related to RAM/CPU & HDD. (A trifecta for the punters out there). I find it quite amusing that every one of the hyperlinks in the health check report points to the exact same web page which is the location of the installation guide. Basically it is telling you to RTFM

                  Here is a sample of the system scan for my virtual machine running on my laptop… (I added the red arrows)

                  TFS Health Check

                  Anyway, this is probably the first new feature many of you will see when you install the Beta 3 release, but there are many more improvements in store of you once you get the product installed.

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