I’ll start this post by saying that in the past I’ve always used Subversion for source control and Team City or Cruise Control as a continuous integration server. As such this is my first every experience with TFS but with the release of 2010 Beta 2 I thought it was time to take a look at Microsoft's latest offering.

With Visual Studio 2010 you can now install TFS on Windows 7, Vista and XP so gone is the need to have a Windows Server box kicking about to host your TFS instance. My install was on a Windows 7 virtual machine hosted on VMware Workstation 6.5.

The install is separated into two sections. Install and Configuration, I’ll start with the Install. As always these steps worked for me but they may not work for you.

Install

The first step is to fire up the installer and to click through the first welcome screen and the license screen.

 
Next you will be asked which of the components you would like to install. I selected both Team Foundation Server and the Build Service.

 
Now sit back and watch it install.

 
After a couple of minutes we’re all done, how easy was that? I should add that there was a reboot required after the install of the .NET Framework 4.0 but the whole install still came in under the 10 minute mark.

Configuration

After installing TFS you now need to configure it. When you click Finish on the TFS install up pops the TFS server configuration wizard.

  
I’m not doing an advanced install so I’m just going to make my way through the basic configuration wizard. If you select the advanced install you have full control over the IIS settings, SQL settings etc.

You can install to an existing SQL Server Instance or you can use SQL Express which is the option I’m going for. In this case the SQL Express Instance is running on the same machine as TFS.

Click through a few more screens to verify all of the details and the wizard will then start to configure TFS for you.

 
Before you know it we’re done and up pops the administration console.

Both steps combined took 30 minutes at most. I’ll write up a post soon on my experience of setting up the first project in my new TFS instance.

visual studio 2010, visual studio 2010, tfs, tfs