Team Foundation Server 2008: First Impressions

Finally. I’ve managed to gain access to a copy of Team Foundation Server 2008 which judging by these C9 videos, is a significant improvement on its predecessor.

At least that’s what you’d expect from a v2 product…

The reality is a bit different.

I used a W2K3 virtual machine, so repeating a fresh install was not much of an issue. Installation succeeded on fourth attempt, and before you ask – I did read the manual and I did follow the checklist for Single-Server installation.

Each failed installation attempt resulted in a new error message during a different stage of the installation process (most recent one detailed here).

The is puzzling. Why doesn’t install-time prerequisite validation prevent these errors from happening? Isn’t the whole point of the validation process to ensure that the right environment is in place? Why was I unable to reproduce the installation errors (and received a different error every time)? How many things can possibly go wrong on a fresh install of W2k3 server to cause this to happen?

Now that it’s finally installed I can configure Team Explorer on my dev machine and actually start using TFS.

More on this later…