Straight from Rob Caron’s blog this morning comes the following news about a Team Foundation Server Beta 3 Setup survey. If you have ever installed TFS Beta 3, please take a few minutes to complete the survey and provide information back to the product team.

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The Team Foundation Server setup experience has been evolving for over a year now in response to feedback we’ve received from people like you. While we’ve made significant progress since that first release last year as Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 Refresh with Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server, we now there’s still more that we can do.

In addition to feedback we’ve received by e-mail and the forums, we have created a survey to ask some specific questions we’d like to ask based on your experience with Team Foundation Server Beta 3. If you have attempted (successfully or otherwise) to install Team Foundation Server Beta 3, we invite you to participate in this brief online survey. As we begin the drive to shipping Team Foundation Server early next year, it’s important that we receive your feedback now.

The survey is located here:

https://MSCUILLUME.smdisp.net/Collector/Survey.ashx?Name=TFS+Setup+Beta+3

This is an anonymous survey, but you have the option of providing contact information should wish to be contacted about your setup experience. Partial surveys are not preserved, so please complete the survey before navigating away from the page.

We look forward to your feedback!

This coming Tuesday I will be presenting a session to the QMSDNUG entitled “Visual Studio 2005: Focus on Team Foundation Server“

Abstract: In this first part of a two part series, we will be focusing on the Team Foundation Server (TFS) part of Visual Studio 2005 Team System. The session will cover an overview of what TFS is and the installation of the product. We will examine the architecture of TFS and outline various scenarios for implementing TFS in your organisation. To finish up, we will do a hands-on demonstration of Work Item Tracking and using the Enterprise-class Source Control features of TFS.

Chuck will also be webcasting this session for those people who cannot attend the session. To sign up for the Webcast click here.

I will make the slides and demo code available shortly after the presentation for anyone wishing to download them.

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.

                

                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)

                

                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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Well I am back from my honeymoon and I have a HUGE amount of email and blog posts to wade through to see what I have missed in the past few weeks.

Team Foundation Server Beta 3 has been out for a few weeks now and scanning the blogs shows that quite a few people have installed the product now and almost all are completely positive towards the progress the VSTS team have made from earlier builds.

I was reading a post by Eric Lee where he talks about the plans for integration between Team Foundation Server and VS2003. This will be of particular interest as many organisations gradually transition from vs2003 over to VS2005. He is a snippet of what Eric has to say;

“The integration between Team Foundation Server is MSSCCI + a little bit.  This little bit allows Team Foundation Server to provide functionality like work item integration, check-in policy, etc. …  After Team Foundation Server finalizes in Q1 2006, the development team will focus on porting some aspects of the Team Foundation Server Object Model to .NET 1.1.  Doing this will allow us to provide integration between Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio 2003.  This integration will be done only through MSSCCI…  Team Explorer is not being ported to VS 2003, so customers won’t have work items, reports, build, etc.  For that they will have to use the stand alone Team Explorer (which in turn means they will have to install .NET 2.0).”

Read the complete post on his blog here.

Expect to see quite a few more posts as I wade through the backlog over the next fews days.

Well the blog has been quieter than usual for a few weeks while I have been off getting married to my long time girlfriend Shane. The ceremony and reception were held at the Marriott Hotel in Brisbane in front of  50 of our closest friends. We are now in New Zealand touring the north island before crossing over to the south island for a few days before flying home from Christchurch.

Here are a few photos of the occasion.

   

Following the path of Team Foundation Server has not always been easy. The occasional frequent Error 32000 experienced during installation of the earlier Betas and CTPs was almost enough to make the less stoic enthusiast run a mile. Fortunately that should be well behind us now.

The TFS B3 experience is much improved and many people (Eg. Jeff Beehler, Sam Gentile, Etienne) are reporting success during the installation so long as they RTFM.

Rick LaPlante has some must read information here () concerning the Go-Live license for TFS Beta 3.

My first big plus for B3 is the ability to connect to TFS using a workgroup computer. This allows me to run VSTS RC on my laptop and then run up TFS in a single-server configuration virtual machine when I need it for demos etc. THis is a must have for presentations and working on the road.

Stay tuned for more on TFS B3 soon.

I was just about to blow away my last set of Virtual Server images and spin up a new set from some sysprep’d images I setup just for this purpose when I remembered someone mentioning the Uninstall tool Microsoft released a couple of weeks ago. This tool takes the pain out of having to remove all the old bits of VSTS & SQL 2005 you may have previously installed as a beta or release candidate.

If this tool sounds useful for you, it can be downloaded from Microsoft here  (315kb). This page also details the manual steps which (fortunately) you should never need to do again.

Having downloaded and installed the Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite Release Candidate, I was starting to regularly check the MSDN Subscribers download site for news on Team Foundation Server Beta 3. Fortunately a post on Soma’s blog indicates that TFS Beta 3 should turn up on MSDN Subscribers downloads during next week so I can enjoy my weekend with checking the site every few hours    (What a geek I hear you say) 

For all those MSDN Subscribers out there, you can now download the Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite Release Candidate 1 ISO from the MSDN Subscriber website. At a little over 3.6Gb you will need to be patient while it downloads.

One thing to remember however is that the RC1 release is not covered by the Beta 2 Go-Live license.

For DotNetRocks show #129, Carl & Richard talk to Joel Semeniuk (Microsoft Regional Director) from Imaginet about Visual Studio Team System and how it is used in the real world. The show runs for 1hr 22min and covers the various designers available in Visual Studio Team System and much more. Definitely worth your time to download this show and drop in on your PocketPC for a listen.