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.