The TFS Administration Guide is a great resource for anyone who maintains one or more TFS instances (or is planning/considering doing so). Here are a couple highlight topics: Team Foundation Server Planning Checklist This covers everything...

This was the most popular question asked at our booth (and perhaps all of the VSTS area) at Tech Ed Developers 2008. It was asked in various forms, but they all boil down to basically the same question: How should I manage branching and merging? Some...

I'm back after a fun week at Microsoft TechEd Developers 2008. I answered tons of questions about Team System in general - and Version Control, Build, and Setup in particular. I've brought back a variety of feedback and feature requests. Over the course...

I know my blog has been on hiatus; but if any of you readers are attending TechEd in Orlando, Florida this week (June 2-6) and would like to meet me, here's your chance :) I'll be at the Team Foundation Server booth in the Technical Learning Center...

First, let me thank everyone who filled out the survey . With Brian and a few others spreading the word, we collected 100 responses very quickly. Here are some follow-up thoughts and further questions based on the received data: I apologize for the survey...

I'm working on some test planning for the next release of Team Foundation Server. One area I'm focused on is testing various possible configurations of TFS. Here are a few of the configurations we regularly test: All on one box - App Tier, Data Tier,...

Some of you may be familiar with the "AT Warm Standby" feature that was included with TFS 2005 (aka Whidbey). This feature is also available in TFS 2008 (aka Orcas) but with some slight changes. Our guidance to people using this feature is to install...

Setup. Setup. Setup. That's what I've been focused on for quite some time, and we're pretty excited about the improvements we've made for Orcas (aka Tfs 2008). I could barely pull myself away to play Halo 3 last night! :) TFS has some challenges in this...

I wanted to post a couple tips relating to some issues we've seen with this scenario, mostly because I did some searching of my own and there's not a lot of guidance out there (yet). Issue 1: Installing and Configuring Windows SharePoint Services on LHS...

Jeff posted that the 'unofficial' guidance for modifying TFS2005 to use WSS 3.0 (on the AT or a remote machine) is now official. You can read his full post here . To jump straight to the goodies (note that, right now, the Tech Notes page has a little...

Totally off topic: We just got back from watching Transformers . I'll write up a bigger review if there's interest. The short version: It was awesome. Great action movie, one of the few that actually does a decent job at also telling a story and connecting...

Becoming a full-time employee of Microsoft (or "MSFTie") is often jokingly referred to as " joining the collective " in public and even within our cybernetic halls. I mentioned awhile back that we'd gotten some additional team-members on the Setup/Admin...

Sudhir has been blogging up a storm lately. He has a series of posts describing what we've done to improve setup for Orcas, and covers some likely "Whidbey to Orcas" migration scenarios. For example, if you have Whidbey with a local SharePoint 2 installation...

So...I haven't exactly been blogging lately. This is (mostly) a "no news is good news thing" - what have I been up to? Finishing up a feature crew that delivered an improved TFS setup experience, support for upgrading from Whidbey (VS 2005), enhanced...

We're working on improving our SharePoint integration for the Orcas release of TFS, as you may have heard/read by now. I've been pretty busy lately on the setup-, admin-, and ops-related aspects of this work, and I thought you might like to hear some...

James tagged me - I guess it was only a matter of time. Being the avid Snow Crash fan that I am, I feel like I'm propagating a virus... gen(n-1) tag: James Five Things You Didn't Know About Me In the same vein (no pun intended) as James',...

Dan Kershaw has produced (and updated) a whitepaper for folks who don't want their TFS AppTier and SharePoint servers on the same machine. Unfortunately, the doc seems to have moved since most of the links out there were created. As of right now, it...

I haven't been posting much lately. The reasons are very much "no news is good news", though, not an ominous silence. The AdminOps team is "heads-down", so we can get some key improvements for TFS done and polished in the timeframe we've set for ourselves...

James recently posted more details on our ISAPI filter and how it enables access to TFS in common extranet scenarios. I'm very interested in feedback and suggestions on this feature. We want to know if it helps you, or if not, what it's lacking or what...

SP1 introduces an extranet feature to Team Foundation Server. Before I link you to the details, though, please accept some cautionary notes (being professionally paranoid when it comes to software security is part of my job description). Warning the...

The short version: If you've encountered the scenario above, make sure the user running PCW is in the designated Sharepoint Administration Group, not just added to the server with the Administrator Role. The rest of the story: I'm creating this note...

Slightly off my normal topics, but I wanted to post a quick note about Vista. More of a "datapoint" than a general review. On the downside, I'm discovering that 1GB of RAM just really isn't enough for what I do with a machine (professionally) these...

PowerShell , the bits formerly known as Monad. I imagine many of you have heard of it by now. If you're like a lot of us in TFS Admin Ops, you're also looking forward to kicking the tires and starting to figure out just how much you'll be able to do with...

In addition to being Jeff Goldblum's favorite one-liner ( apparently ), this is a pretty common expression for anyone dealing with computers. My experience has been that, aside from the very day you get a brand new machine, you probably wish it could...

I'm still hoping to hear more input/feedback on what sorts of stats/conditions you'd like to see exposed in a MOM pack for TFS. Here's a list of some of the top scenarios we're planning around (this list is by no means complete, it's just a sample...