Last night I set about resolving the at least one of the issues regarding undoing pending changes, mentioned in the previous post. It so happened that just before I was getting ready for the fix, my TFS users discovered they couldn't also add new files to the TFS source safe. Bummer! The server event logs pointed to the collation mismatch between the tempdb and the TFSVersionControl database.

SQL Server Collation Issue
The background to the collation issue is as follows. The TFS 2005 database was setup with the default collation which was SQL_Latin1_General_CI_AS. This database was actually a Developer Edition which worked without a hitch during the last several months TFS 2005 was in production. When I set about upgrading to the new TFS, I installed the SQL Server Enterprise edition on the new server with collation designed to Latin1_General_CI_AS. This was done with little research and no knowledge on my part about how different collations could have such drastic effects. When I restored the databases from the old TFS server to the new one, the restored databases defaulted to the old collation (SQL_Latin1_General_CI_AS).

The FIX
As part of the fix, I tried changing the database collations on both tempdb and TFSVersionControl databases to suit either. No luck!

After installing a named instance of SQL Server database I discovered that the default settings (Directory order, case-insensitive, for use with 1252 Char) in Collation Settings page of the SQL Server install wizard will lead a collation of SQL_Latin1_General_CI_AS. Voila!

So I set about uninstalling the SQL Server databases on the server. Reinstalled and attached the databases. Didn't work! I mean this time the TFS itself wouldn't work. Bugger. So I thought uninstall the TFS itself and reinstall. Now even the TFS wouldn't uninstall. Wouldn't repair either. Bugger x 2! I discovered amongst other things that if the TFS databases are messed up it would simply not work. I mean not work for anything including uninstall. So I fixed it with a simple hack. Delete the Team Foundation Server site in IIS. Tried uninstalling again and it worked.

The rest was simple. I reinstalled TFS, re-attached the the databases to the new SQL default instance with the collation settings of SQL_Latin1_General_CI_AS. So almost everything except for the Reports Server is working.

A rather painful fix for something that ideally shoud have simple fix. Microsoft and the SQL Server product developers aren't my favourite bunch of people right now, but I suppose I can live with that. If there's one lesson from all of this, then it is to learn and appreciate the world of SQL Server Collations. You'll get into a lot of shit if you don't consider it as one of the prime factors in any SQL Server migrations, restorations or just general installation and use.

The TFS upgrade and migration has been a success. It certainly wasn't a smooth ride. It took me two rounds to knock the beast into place. The first round failed for some unknown reason, so I repeated the process but with a clean install of everything.

The upgraded TFS works fine except when you undo pending changes for source files. The undo process itself seems to be working fine, but for some reason it throws an error on the client side and logs an event on the server event logs. This issue is well described here (http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2790907&SiteID=1).

If you like me upgraded the Sharepoint version on TFS2005 from 2.0 to 3.0, your sharepoint databases will most likely have a different name to that used by TFS2008/WSS3.0. During the database restoration proces, remember to restore to the database used by TFS2008/WSS3. Otherwise your Sharepoint Services will not work and you will not be able to add projects to your new TFS.

On my TFS2005 server, the WSS and the SQL Server Reports worked on different IIS port numbers. If you follow the upgrade process to the letter, you will end up with the same port number for both Reports and WSS. There are fixes for it in two different places affecting the Team Web Access, WSS Project Sites... Have to run along now. Will talk about this in another post.

Last Friday I installed the trial version of TFS 2008 on our new server. Installation of this version was a breeze, with absolutely no problems to report. Team Web Access, like before was a separate download and install.

Tonight I will be upgrading and migrating from the old server and TFS 2005. The plan is simple:

1. Backup the old server
2. Upgrade the old server to TFS2008
3. Backup TFS2008 on the old server
4. Restore old server backup on the new server with TFS2008
   

Resources helping me tonight:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ms404869(printer).aspx
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ms253070.aspx

Starting today I will be working on upgrading to Team Foundation Server 2008 (TFS2008) from our current TFS2005 setup.

The current setup is TFS2005 180 day trial edition. This has been in production now for about 165 days and currently hosts 3 projects. It was implemented following my Teched 2007 expedition to Gold Coast in August. It has served us reliably as a source control, project management tool and work item management tool. Other features such as the Document Management feature running on Sharepoint Server frequently collapsed or locked documents for no apparent reason. This forced us to store documents in the source control leaving the Sharepoint features useless. Team Web Access was also put to good use.

Upgrading is a need as the trial version nears it's expiry.

TFS2008: What am I am looking forward to?

• Build: In TFS2005 we had to cobble together a whole host of third party utilities for CI Builds, Scheduled Builds, etc.
• Server Management: Managing users and roles was made easy (but not perfect) in TFS2005 using Power Toys for VS2005.

TFS2008: Licencing

I hate the way TFS2008 is licenced! I'd love to see some rationale from Microsoft as to why TFS2008 Standard edition isn't part of any of the MSDN Subscription packages. It's a product intricately linked to Visual Studio and yet the only version available for MSDN Subscribers is the Workgroup Edition limited to 5 users. I hope MS thinks harder about the licencing program for this product and gave the MSDN Subscribers some more options. For us I guess, the only way is to grab a fully licenced version sometime before the end of trial period.

Migration!

I will prepare the migration plan sometime tomorrow. The complication for us, is that we're upgrading to another server. Having read bits of different migration options, it'd be a challenge to migrate without any serious impact to the work item tracking and source controlled item history. I intend to document the experience here in as much detail as possible.

As with any Microsoft product, nothing is simple, so I am sure this won't be a walk in the park.

If you use Team Foundation Server and Team System for development, you would have come across, Build Ticker, the handy tool which keeps you updated on all team builds. This is a great tool for TFS administrators.

There are a couple of snags though. First, because it runs in the background, it does consume a fair bit of memory, especially if you're trying to squeeze every bit of memory for whatever else you're doing.

Second; it will prevent you from shutting your system down. I kept getting the following warning logged in the event logs.

Source: USER32
EventID: 1073
Description: The attempt to reboot <yourComputerName> failed 

 I figured out after discovering that when the Build Ticker loads at system bootup, the options window for it load as well. It doesn't appear on the desktop unless you select it by the Alt-Tab method.

So now, before shutting down, I right click on the Build Ticker icon in the tray and click exit. System will happily power down after that.