Installing Team Foundation Server

Now that was an experience. Not a particularly good one, but an experience nonetheless. Actually, I haven’t had that much trouble installing something since the last time I messed with installing something on a Linux box. Lots of prerequisites, quite a number of cryptic error messages, and hours.

Of course, two things increased the annoyance of this experience. First, the box had a previous beta version of the 2.0 .net framework and Sql Server 2005. I had to delete both of them before starting, but never could actually get through the install. At the very end I was getting a very strange error message that I could not figure out how to get around. Being frustrated, and feeling that the previous betas may just be sticking it to me on this one, I paved over the machine with a new install of 2003 server. Many, many hours later, and only a few cryptic messages later, I actually got it installed.

The other thing is performance. Take their performance requirements seriously. I installed this on a machine that didn’t even come close to their requirements (one reason why it took ages I’m sure, but probably not a reason for many of the annoyances I faced). They recommend at the very least 1 gig of ram and a 2.2 ghz processor. I got it installed on a 700 mhz processor and 256M of ram. Yes, it is agonizingly slow. But it works. I can see it in action, even if the action is in slow-motion... Right now I’m considering an upgrade. I haven’t even decided for sure if I’m going to use TFS for my development at home. Regardless, though, it would be nice to have a faster machine for my build server.