As momentum to adopt TFS builds, many organizations and individuals are overwhelmed by its complexity. They feel as though “we’ve bought the Dreamliner. Now if we could just figure out how to make it take off, fly to Paris and land.” In a large company where we’re assisting with migration from Visual Source Safe to TFS, we’ve recently held getting-started presentations. Each presentation is to 20 or so developers, analysts and managers. The overwhelming consensus is that TFS is a powerful and very useful foundation, but that there needs to be a more user-friendly tool on top of it that provides a simpler interface, and that provides real Agile guidance that walks the user through the Agile process, rather than simply providing the raw tools to do so.
In talking to Adam Gallant, Microsoft Technology Solutions Professional for Developer Tools, I understand that Microsoft recognizes that TFS does not provide a “great end user experience” and they are intentionally leaving the door open to 3rd party developers to create such tools.
Keep an eye open in the new year for these tools to start to emerge.

Configuring user security in Team Foundation Server can be confusing, since security has to be set at three levels: TFS, SharePoint and Reporting Services. Because it’s complex, many people resort to using the TFS Power Tools. The problem with this method is that you don’t ever really have a clear understanding of how security should be configured.
I took a bit of time to boil it down to its simplest form, and the result is this short and easy to follow document: Configuring User Security in TFS 2010.

We’ve been implementing a large TFS 2010 installation and recently started the migration from VSS. I’m writing to say that so far I’m impressed with the migration tool. It’s clearly documented in the MSDN library. A couple of XML configuration files drive the app. After setting up the config files you launch the migration process from the command line. I was surprised to find that you can migrate any subset of projects from VSS at a time. You don’t have to migrate the whole VSS database in one shot. I was also surprised to see that the tool mapped VSS users to TFS users and preserved version history by users. Remember to create the target users in TFS, then edit the user map file to point VSS users to TFS users.
It all works great so far. Now keep in mind we’ve only done a small pilot project. I’ll write back once we get onto larger ones.

Team Foundation Server

We’ve been working in a large organization to install Team Foundation Server and to implementAgile methodologies. There are a hundred developers and approximately 90 applications developed over twenty years.
We went with TFS 2010 primarily for the 32 bit support and have been pleased so far with the quality. The installation is vastly improved. Gone is the fragility of previous versions. Configuration is straightforward and the config dashboard is a welcome addition.
A couple of caveats. You need the VS 2008 forward compatibility pack to enable connection to tfs 2010. The forward compatibility pack for VS 2005 is not yet released but will be in the new year so VS 2005 clients have to wait until then to connect. VS 2008 does not enable admin functionality so you also will need to install the TFS 2020 client to do admin functions like creating projects.
All in all we are impressed so far with this upgrade to the TFS line and will comment more as we start to implement functionality.

I'm moving my blog from WordPress to here at Google. I just find the WordPress interface too slow. Sorry, I tried.