Wanted: TFS Installer

I reckon someone could just make a living out of doing TFS installation and deployment. It would be a lucrative job. For the past couple of weeks, I've been neck-deep into TFS and VSTS 2008. It's been an enlightening experience to say the last.

One of the things I learnt the hard way was to do with TFS and the SQL Server collations. One of the pre-requisites to installing TFS 2008 is to install SQL Server. I chose SQL Server 2005 because SS08 has not gone to RTM. I read the installation steps careful enough not to miss out any steps (also learnt this the hard way while installing TFS 2005). But little did I notice how important it is to choose the right collation settings for SQL Server 2005.

It's imperative to know that TFS does not support case sensitive collation settings, nor does it support accent sensitive collation settings. And when you're at the SQL Server installation step of selecting the collation type, pay extra attention. DO NOT select the defaults. Select Latin1_General, case-insensitive, and accent-sensitive. Remember, do not even check any other boxes. There's no turning back is you missed this very important step.

In a later post, I will talk about TFS Build, and also the possibility of introducing a TFS Build proxy that will act as the "load balancer" for all the registered build agents. Until a later post.

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