Team Foundation Server 2005 Workgroup

What an aboslute beast of a child!

I now have the displeasure of installing this development environment. The nice thing about the installation is the installation guide. The steps involved are in my opinion, second-rate for a multi-billion dollar company.

The requirements are laid out fairly well. You need:

Server 2003 (check)
IIS 6 with ASP.NET (check)
SharePoint Services (doc didn't work for me here)
SQL 2005 (no SP worked for me, applying it afterwards)

The main caveat for anyone attempting to install, is to follow the guide, and utilize the different accounts for their roles, or you will run in problems while installing.

One feature I do like is how the pre-installation checks take place. These need to go much further though. For example, you need IIS to be freshly installed, that means no Virtual Server or any other website installed. Virtual Server 2005 R2 is at least kind enough in their installation steps to warn you of the potential issues installing on other than the default website will cause. Quite simply, Team Foundation web tier (unless you are an absolute whiz on IIS 6) demands sole existence.

The other issue I had was with the SharePoint installation. While it's easy enough to appreciate you must manually install sharepoint so as to not use MSDE, make sure you don't make any configuration changes on the default admin website or again, you will have to start from scratch. The same goes for the reporting services, don't touch it, no matter how much you think you may need to for permissions or whatever. The Team Foundation installation will handle all of it. What I found perplexing is while the default installation of Sharepoint Services 2.0 SP2 worked fine, when I tried to install Sharepoint Services 3.0 (and yes folks, 3.0 is listed in the installation manual), the Team Foundation installation demanded SharePoint Services 2.0 with SP2! This was the only descrepancy I found in an otherwise well-written installation document.

Once the installation completes with success, you are not given much direction as for what to do next. In order to now actually use this, one must have the Team Explorer application installed/added in to their existing Visual Studio 2005 setup. This is done by using the Team Foundation Server setup program, and selecting that option.

After the installation completes the first step is to add users/groups to the foundation server, using the account you installed with, on the foundation server. Open Visual Studio, then click on the newly created Team menu item. From there you navigate to Team Foundation Studio Configuration, then go to groups. The interface here is pretty self-explanatory. You add the users/groups for permissions to the default security groups or create your own. All should then work, right? Wrong. For users to use Team Foundation Workgroup (standard requires purchase of its own license), each user must be individually added to the Licenses group. That original user for installation will appear here (that's who you're logged in to get to this point). Once you add at least one other administrator, you can then log out, use the new administrator, then remove the installation account to make use of all five licensed connections.

Once the installation finally goes ahead, everything runs fairly smooth. In conclusion, I found the installation to have some very positive areas, and some areas that could build upon the Virtual Server installation scenario. It was a bit like having a family member refuse to sit and eat at the dinner table because the plates/forks/etc were not set to their liking.

Virtual PC Time Synchronization

Today I received a question on how to disable the VM time synch with its host. The answer for this is not as straight-forward as it is with VMWare.

http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2007/11/28/disabling-time-synchronization-under-virtual-pc-2007.aspx

In short, adjust the .vmrc xml file to include the following tags (under mouse is fine)



false



At least it is in XML