Thursday, May 6, 2010

Team Foundation Server 2010 and Visual Studio 2008

We recently decided to use Team Foundation Server as our source control and, really, project management system.  This decision was made just before the release of the 2010 products so we decided to move forward to TFS 2010 even though we might not have Visual Studio 2010 immediately (it ends up we did).  Because of this I needed to find out how or if you can connect to TFS 2010 using Visual Studio 2008 and Team Explorer 2008.  Well, it turns out that you can, but, at least at the time, the documentation on how-to wasn’t easy to find.  Thus I decided to share what I learned. 

The best article I found showed how to successfully connect using VS 2008, but when I tries it I couldn’t make it work. The next reference I found said that you needed to have installed Team Explorer 2008 and then install Visual Studio 2008 SP1.  Of course I already had VS 2008 SP1 installed before I installed Team Explorer 2008.  First I tried re-applying SP1 after installing Team Explorer 2008, no joy.  So I uninstalled it all and re-installed in the “proper” order: VS 2008, Team Explorer 2008, VS 2008 SP1.  Still no joy.  I found another article that shows how to make it work with a registry hack, but I wasn’t going to go there, I’d rather update to VS 2010.

I was on the verge of giving up when I finally found this patch from Microsoft.  Essentially MS released an update specifically for this issue, but I spent 2 days looking before I found it anywhere.

Hopefully this blog post will help someone else.

2 comments:

So what do you think I am?