Upgrade: VS 2005 to Orcas

We have put in a lot of effort on getting our Upgrade experience right. It is not perfect but I think it is great. This post is first in the series of posts around upgrade. You can have so many scenarios around upgrade; I will take one scenario at a time to provide more details. For now let's talk about basic upgrade from VS 2005 TFS to Orcas Beta 2 or higher. The experience for you should is same as new setup. Our upgrade is completely integrated into setup. Setup will ask for your database server name. We probe the database server to check if it is a existing database from VS 2005. If it is we upgrade it to Orcas. You can either have VS2005 RTM or SP1 version.

We also realized some customers may uninstall VS2005 before running Setup for Orcas and therefore we have made sure the Orcas setup can handle that scenario. Following are few pre-requisites for upgrade to work flawlessly.

1. You should have had a running VS 2005 before you started the upgrade process. It does not matter if you uninstalled VS2005, but before you uninstalled the VS2005 TFS server must be in healthy and running state.
2. You are not allowed to change the service accounts at time of upgrade. You have to use the same TFS service and data sources account that was used to run TFS before upgrade.
   1. You can change the accounts after upgrade is successful using TFSAdminUtil tool.
3. You should not try to change the name of TFS servers or database location at time of upgrade all this can be done after the upgrade is successful.

Having spoken about limitation now let's talk about some key scenarios you all will be interested in. You all want to use the new features provided in Orcas. How do you get your VS 2005 TFS Server to run with all the new features of Orcas TFS? Following are the major scenarios

1. How do I upgrade from VS 2005 with default instance of TFS to Orcas with SQL named instance?
2. How do I upgrade from VS 2005 with WSS2.0 to Orcas with WSS3.0?
3. How do I upgrade from VS2005 with WSS3.0 to Orcas with remote (existing) WSS3.0 farm?
4. How do I upgrade from VS 2005 with domain account for TFS service to Orcas with Network Service?

I will try to explain each of these scenarios in next few posts. The key here is the standard upgrade will only upgrade you from VS 2005 TFS with WSS2.0 to Orcas TFS with WSS2.0. We have to perform some extra steps to achieve above 4 scenarios. It is not difficult but just few more steps.

You should see additional posts soon…