I've got Team System Working. Now what?
A decision was made this week that myself and a friend would try to install the VS2005 beta refresh and get the team system bits up and going. Yeah yeah, i know, about bloody time hey? :)
Neither of us have a good enough computer to get the three virtual PCs all running at once, so we settled on using two computers (mine and his) working together with the three VPC instances running in total. The cool thing is that these are pretty low specced machines as far as the hosts are concerned. On my machine (an Athlon XP 2400 with 512 meg of RAM running XP Pro SP2) I've currently got two virtual Windows server 2003 instances running, and on the other (an Arthlon XP 2000 with 512 meg running XP Pro SP2) a virtual XP pro for the VS beta.
Most of this blog entry is about how we got it all up and going. As far as i'm concerned, there aren't enough install guides for it to make it easy, and while this isn't a complete howto, it should hopefully help some of you others out there. After my install notes, I have a series of notes on what i could and couldn't figure out so far. If you think you can help (and already know how to install) jump on down to the bottom.
The first thing I did was a heap of reading to find out what issues people had already had and what people had done to get it to work. The two most useful things that I found were:
Both these guys talk about how they got it going up and going for themselves, and i started getting ready to make my first virtual PC image underway.
But then I found this post: Virtual Server 2005 on Windows XP by Jeff Alexander and decided that if virtual server puts less load on the host system, then it's probably worth it. So I installed Virtual Server 2005 on my XP box. It worked a charm, especially since i didn't have urlscan on my home machine. This is the first time i've played with virtual server, and mostly very impressed. There's a couple of little niggling things about the web interface that I don't particularly like, but it's mostly all good :)
I created a new virtual hard drive, and attached a new virtual machine to it. I only allocated 128 meg of ram to it. I named it w2k3dc since my plan was for it to become the domain controller. I kicked off the windows 2003 installer and all went smoothly. I left it in a work group for now.
Then i chucked on the VM additions, and man they make a difference :)
Note that IIS isn't installed yet. I ran windows update and got all the updates. Then i reconfigured the network adapter to use a static IP address (10.0.0.58 looked good). Then i shut the server down and copied the virtual hard drive file to a new location.
So, like magic, I have two windows 2003 installations - except for a couple little clashes like ip address, machine SID, host name...only minor details :) SysInternals comes to the rescue with NEWSID. I started up the new copy and downloaded and ran it. I now had a new server with a new SID, a new name (w2k3fs for Foundation Server), and a new IP address (once i changed the settings).
Back to the first instance, i installed IIS which means adding the Application Server Role. And then, because i didn't want to lose my work so far, i created a new virtual hard drive that used differencing from the first, and used that - then i always had a base to start with for the domain controller box.
Next I installed SQL Server 2005 Beta 2. This worked fine.
Then I added the Domain Controller server role, which didnt' work fine, so i hit cancel. I added the DNS server role and played and fidgeted and played and tinkered and did stuff that i have no idea what, but it appeared to work. Then i added the Domain Controller role again and it worked a charm.
Then i added a domain account TFSIdentity for the foundation server to use.
At this point, it's time to backup the domain controllers virtual hard drives, because i was done with it.
With the other server i installed IIS6 (again by adding the application server role) but DIDN'T install fontpage server extensions. Then i again setup a differencing virtual hard drive so i could fall back, and then got the machine to join the domain.
At this stage it was time to analyse the application server install guide part of the doco that comes with the beta 1 refresh dvd - bascially, if you follow it's instructions explicitly, you'll be fine.
I added windows sharepont services (not portal), and ADAM. Then off to windows update to get all the patches that apply to the new stuff :)
Now i made a second differencing hard drive because i'm paranoid.
All that was left at this point was to install the team foundation server. You'd think the hard part is over right? Installing the foundation server bombed out on me - at this stage it was tuesday night. On wednesday night i tried again, and it bombed out again. No error code, no nothing.
I did some research on install errors, and they always talked about error codes. Then i found this: Ten things to know before starting VSTS Foundation Server Installation. It was very helpful, mostly about how to find what errored when it doesn't tell you. So i deciphered the error log and made a decision.
On friday night i added another 512 meg to my machine and gave each of the windows boxes 350 meg of ram to play with. I ran the install again, and it worked a charm. It's funny what a little bit of speed and power will do.
So, once the install was complete, i pulled the extra ram out. I was determined to do this on as minimum spec as possible, jsut to prove a point :) Then it was time to fire up the virtual PC on the other computer to get an XP going in my new domain. This was simple and painless. The visual studio install wasn't :)
To get all the integration stuff, you need to install a few other things first:
- .net framework 1.1
- office 2003 (word and excel, anyway)
- project 2003
- .net framework 1.1 sp1
- office sp1
- project sp1
Once all was ready, i fired off the visual studio installer. I'm happy in my VB niche, and didn't want the installer to take forever, so i only had it install the bare minimum of stuff - turned off C++, C#, J#, SourceSafe, all the other stuff...just VB and the Team System stuff were left.
And that didn't work. I found this post from Korby Parnell. In the comments he mentioned how you need to install SourceSafe to get it to use the foundation server for source control. Wierd, but oh well. I uninstalled VS and put it back on again.
I got visual studio talking to the foundation server, and created some a solution and added it to source control. Then i added a project, and some code, and added that too. It checked out fine, committed fine...but what else can i do?
I created a portfolio, and it made a hunk of work items. I couldn't modify them, but they were there :) I opened Project, and it showed me the work items. I opened excel and i saw the work items.
I logged in as a different user and couldn't figure out how to get a copy of the code that was under source control so i could make a change.
I tried to diff some code with the previous version, and it told me that .vb was an unrecognised extension.
I tried to hit the command line, and discovered that 'h.exe help command' will give help on that command. Not for 'h.exe help difference' it doesn't. :)
I'm sure i have a lot more reading to do yet. Maybe i've been reading the wrong stuff so far, so i've missed the obvious. Actually, that's very likely.
I'm happy. I got it working. I realise that it's a pre-beta release. But i don't know what to do with it now :) It's not appearing to me to be very functional yet, so i've had a tiny sneak preview, but haven't had any answers as to how this is going to compete with ClearCase yet. I'm so impatient!! :)
So that's my story. Hopefully there'll be a new community drop soon with more functionality - Beta2 is still looking really far away :) I'm sure you're all bored to tears with this, but i wanted to get it all jotted down for next time.