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Nikita and I got to spend some time with some folks in Orlando this week talking about Team Foundation Server 2008.  A few questions came up that we weren't prepared to answer on the spot, and I promised an online follow-up.  Here it is!

Is TFS integration supported in the Expression line of products?
The unfortunate short answer is "Not yet".  I installed Expression Studio2 (and applied SP1 for Blend) and there's no source control support.  I found a few posts asking Microsoft to remedy this problem, and apparently they are in fact taking steams to remedy the situation.

What are the differences between the various Visual Studio SKUs?
Good question.  First, here's an update on nomenclature since we're all undoubtedly confused by a certain marketing department's notorious change of heart regarding product names:

What about Standard and Professional builds of Visual Studio? 

1. Visual Studio Express SKU's are free "lite" versions of Visual Studio designed to get new developers on board with the Microsoft development platform.  There's no add-in support or extensibility, and the language/project features are limited.
2. Visual Studio 2008 Standard is the baseline SKU and includes the Visual Studio shell, add-in and extensibility (VSX) support, project upgrade wizard, etc.
3. Visual Studio 2008 Professional is the first version that adds "full setup" for Visual Studio, the full MSDN library, advanced debugging (remote processes, clustered debugging), the object test bench, Office development support, mobile device development support, and more goodies.  No TFS CAL is included with Visual Studio 2008 Standard or Professional.

Beyond the inclusion of a TFS 2008 CAL, VSTS provides a few additional benefits over Visual Studio Professional (namely 64-bit debugging support).  Each VSTS SKU has it's own benefits, highlighted below:

 
If these short one-liner feature names aren't enough, a full side-by-side comparison of Visual Studio SKU's is available. 

If you're looking for a great deal, Microsoft runs promotions on Visual Studio flavors from time to time.

What does the TFS 2008 Upgrade Process look like?
Many of you read my install guide from a few weeks back and wanted to know about the pitfalls of a TFS 2008 upgrade.  What's most important to know is that the TFS upgrade is really a 4 product install comprising of the following tasks:

• WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0 Upgrade
• SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005/2008 Upgrade (you may already have this)
• TFS application tier 2005 to 2008 Upgrade
• TFS database tier 2005 to 2008 Upgrade
• Team Build 2008 install/setup (optional)

WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0 upgrade
The first component that needs to be completed is the upgrade from WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0.  During my last upgrade process, we were actually doing the upgrade, but we wanted to migrate the content database from an existing WSS 2.0 server to a new WSS 3.0 installation on Windows Server 2008.  This is probably the more complex of upgrade scenarios.  Before you start, I strongly recommend reading Upgrade Toolkit for Windows SharePoint Services Sites and Templates guide published by Microsoft.We were able to simplify our upgrade process by performing the following simple steps:

1. Backup the existing WSS 2.0 Content Database
2. Upgrade the WSS 2.0 content database to WSS 3.0
3. Upgrade the WSS 2.0 site templates to WSS 3.0
4. Take special consideration when upgrading WSS 3.0 to WS2008/Vista on IIS 7

SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 Upgrade
You'll be needing at least SQL Server 2005 and Reporting Services to run TFS 2008 against.  Running this on Windows Server 2008?  I recommend a full fledged SQL 2008 upgrade, but if you want, you can get SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services running on Win 2k8/IIS 7 with some work.

1. Running into permissions issues?  Check here.
2. TFS giving you error 29112 when installing TFS 2008 and Reporting Services as part of a scale-out installation?  Check here.
3. Once again, Reporting Services will give you all sorts of hell on IIS 7.  Check here for fixes.

TFS Application tier 2005 to 2008 Upgrade
The recommended way to upgrade TFS is using in-place upgrade mode.  Basically, you pop the TFS 2008 install DVD in the drive of your existing TFS Server, and follow some simple steps.  1) Make a backup of your TFS and WSS databases, 2) go through the install process.  When you go through the install process, TFS will pick up the Application tier's installed location and perform a database and application tier upgrade in-place.  This process has drastically been improved in the TFS 2008 installer, however, there's one caveat that you should know about.

If you want to upgrade your TFS installation *and* move it to a new server, you will need to uninstall your existing TFS installation, upgrade your database manually and then re-install the new TFS installation.  Failure to do so will cause TFS to be configured as a failover node instead of a new TFS installation (whoops). 

If you're having problems, here's some likely fixes:

1. A better upgrade guide than mine accounts for TF220064, Error 29109, 32000 and 32000.
2. This guide goes through all the steps necessary to manually update an Internet-facing TFS 2005 installation to a new server with TFS 2008.
3. Here's another small gem which describes an error in a number of SQL Server reports in the TFS installation that can cause 32000 errors to occur.
4. Lastly, the best idea I've heard so far is to slipstream the SP1 install into your TFS 2008 install.

TFS Database Tier Upgrade
There's a way to do an upgrade on just the TFS database and not the application tier in preparation of a TFS 2008 upgrade or addition of a failover cluster.  Don't do it.  I won't even post the instructions in this blog post because it's just a bad, bad idea.  Let the TFS installer do this job for you -- it's better that way.  You're one collation setting away from disaster if you try it on your own :)

Development tfs, visual studio 2008, vsts