It has been a long time since I have posted on this blog; one of the reasons for the long absence was that after releasing Team Foundation Server 2008 we have started working on the first service pack for the product. And today I am proud to say that we have a beta version of Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 available for download http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DCB535BE-C32E-474C-9F64-282A2849ACC5&displaylang=en

Brian Harry has a post describing the new features in SP1 http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2008/04/28/team-foundation-server-2008-sp1.aspx

As a member of the team responsible for setup one of the main features that I would like to talk about is support for SQL Server 2008 CTP6

As you all know Team Foundation Server 2008 RTM is not compatible with SQL Server 2008 CTP6 and later mainly because there are some changes in Reporting Services & Full Text Search that will cause setup to fail or block on the initial environment check. The Challenge that we had was that we needed to deliver a fix for that in SP1 but in the same time customers are blocked from installing the product on SQL 2008 and from here came the idea of using the integrated install method to install RTM & SP1 together

The steps to perform the integrated install are easy

1. On the server that you plan to install Application Tier on copy the RTM media (AT folder on the DVD) to a local folder say <AT RTM Folder>
2. Extract the SP1 package to a local Folder by executing the command TFS90sp1-KB949786.exe /extract:<SP1 Folder>
3. Run the following command to combine both RTM and SP1 to one install package: msiexec /a <AT RTM Folder>\vs_setup.msi /p <SP1 Folder>\ TFS90sp1-KB949786.msp TARGETDIR=<AT SP1 Folder>
4. Your Integrated RTM+SP1 setup is now available in <AT SP1 Folder>. You can run setup.exe in this folder to install Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1