Pricing is an important topic, and I've written several posts about it.  Today Rick LaPlante announced changes to the pricing of VSTS in response to customer feedback.

Here's one part from Rick's post that I think will really make some people happy.

One area where we received a lot of feedback was from smaller organizations looking to use Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server.  The ability to amortize the cost of the server over a large number of devs makes the Server exceptionally cheap on a per seat basis when you are thinking 20, 50, 100, 500 people per server.  However when you are talking about 3 people on the server, well we can all do the math.  To help address this issue, we will place a limited version of Team Foundation Server in each Visual Studio Team System role edition.  This version will be restricted to a maximum of five users and should serve the needs of smaller organizations.  Teams that have a need for more users should still find that Team Foundation Server is significantly more cost effective than current source code control solutions and offers tremendous value through its role as the core of integration across all of the Team System.

Many folks are interested in guidance on hardware.  In the Team Foundation forum, Brian Harry, Product Unit Manager of Team Foundation, posted the latest preliminary hardware requirements.

If you are going with a single processor box (or if you want to maximize performance), I would recommend changing the warehouse update interval to reduce the load on the server.

Mike Attili has a posted a couple of useful things for using the Team Foundation beta.

If you are tired of getting the "Unable to locate control: ctl00oReportCell" message, check out his solution to elminating the problem in Eliminate ctl00oReportCell error in Team System Project Portal.

He also provides a guide for setting up a group and assigning the permissions in TFS, Rosetta, and SharePoint to allow users in that group to successfully create Team Projects.  See Simplify Authorization for Team Project Creation.

In the Team Foundation forum, a user posted the following problem with Windows backup after installing Team Foundation Server, including the April CTP of SQL 2005.

Prior to installing Team Foundation Server and Client I was able to use the Windows backup utility to successfully create an ASR backup and full backup of the server.

After installinf TFS I find the backup utility fails with the following error:

Error returned while the creating volume shadow copy: 80042301

After looking further into this, it appears that the volume shadow copy service was not started, nor could it be manually started. All other means to start the service failed. It seems to be stopping the backup utility from working.

The answer was posted yesterday.

There is a bug in SQL Server 2005 setup that causes incorrect value to be inserted in the following registry key.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\VSS\VssAccessControl

The workaround to fixing this problem is to delete the VssAccessControl key.
Then you should be able to start the VSS service.

This issue has been fixed in the May CTP of SQL Server 2005 and this workaround would not be needed for new installations of SQL Server 2005 May CTP (or later) as they do not create this registry key.

Note: Once you have this problem, you'll have to manually delete the key. Upgrade to a newer version of SQL Server or uninstall/install would not remove this registry key automatically and the problem will persist.

The News & Observer wrote an article about Brian, Craig, and our office.

Microsoft to expand small Durham office

DURHAM -- Brian Harry jokes that he called Microsoft the evil empire before it was popular to do so.

"I only ever worked for start-ups, and in those days, I viewed it as a behemoth," said Harry, 38.

Now he runs a development office in Durham for the world's largest software company. It is an office that has operated in relative obscurity since it began almost three years ago, and one that is now poised for big expansion.

If you are curious about the office, here are the stats in brief.

Jeff Lucovsky posted a nice two-part series on setting up an RSS feed for your Team Foundation source control server.  Check it out.

Team Foundation RSS Feed Generator for Source Control
Part 2: What's my source control server doing? A RSS feed to keep track of checkins