Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Team Foundation Server

My recent efforts to deploy a Team Foundation Server have paid off.  This is totally against the best efforts of the actual product to foil my attempts.

Seriously, if you just read the documentation provided to do the installation you will end up pulling your hair out.  However, if you wade through a slew of blog posts, forums messages, and other references it is possible to realize this product with its outstanding feature set.

The key that would have made this whole thing easier for me, would have been more information about the precise integration between Sharepoint Services and TFS.  Specific areas that are important are how the security credentials for each should be configured and why, and a means to allow the Sharepoint data sources to be independantly configured.  The two-step of requiring Sharepoint to be setup but not configured and requiring the TFS installation to configure the Sharepoint data sources is really confusing, error-prone, and just plain unfriendly.

In any event, I finally have VPC images with working installations of TFS so I can start working through specific process template customizations and so forth.  Wish me luck!