I have been helping a customer with moving their TFS 2005 server to new hardware and then upgrade it to 2008. I wanted to share some of the things I learned during this.

This are things that all are documented in blogs, forums etc. but I wanted to try to compile it in one post.

To avoid the error 29250 during the upgrade of TFS I created a slipstreamed installer according to the instructions in the installation guide. As you know this means that .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 will be installed. What I didn’t know is that the .NET FW 3.5 installer can fail if the print spooler isn’t started. I found the exact same error I was experiencing described in Aaron Stebner’s blog.

Next issue with .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 is that it is incompatible with Windows SharePoint Services v2.0. This is described on the SharePoint Team blog, the workaround described there is not a viable option in the case of the TFS upgrade since it would probably render TFS unusable. The only thing I could figure out to do was to continue with upgrading WSS to WSS3.0 as described here.

When the WSS upgrade completed I found that I couldn’t open the Team Project Portal for any project that I hadn’t created. I only got the red X in team explorer, when trying to browse directly to the site I got an “Access Denied”. I didn’t understand this since I was using an account that was in the Local Administrators group on the server and it used to work before. I was playing around for a while but finally I had to give up and call my colleague Peter, who knows everything about SharePoint. He naturally told me that the security in SharePoint changed from v2.0 to 3.0, where WSS2 automatically gave you access to all the sites if your account either was a local admin or in the SharePoint Administrator Group set in Central Administration. In WSS 3.0 the same thing can be achieved by using “Policy for Web Application” that is found under the “Application Management” tab in Central Administration.