The Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) CTP build is now up on the MSDN Subscriber downloads site.
There are three bits that comprise a Team System installation
· The Database tier (SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 – Yukon)
· The Application tier (Team Foundation Server)
· The client (Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1 + VSTS Tech Refresh)
When VSTS RTMs the Team Foundation Server will include the SQL Server installation on the same box, unfortunately right now SQL Server 2005 uses a different build of the CLR to Team Foundation server and Side By Side doesn’t work right now.
Therefore you have to run the Database tier on another box (or VPC typically), the “official” and “supported” way is to run Team Foundation Server on another box, and then the client on yet another box – making three machines.
Now if you’ve got spare boxes back in the office this probably isn’t a major problem, but most people will be wanting to demo and play with this stuff on their laptops – Three Virtual PCs pushes even our laptops here with 2GB ram!
So – I’ve managed to install VSTS on two Virtual PCs (Both running Server 2003) by collapsing the client tier onto the Application Team (Team Foundation Server and VS2005 Beta1) on the same box. They both use the same CLR and it seems to work fine.
Note – This is not “supported” by the product team right now but by their own admission it should “be fine” – The risk is yours though ;-)
The install instructions specify that domain service accounts should be used – to try and avoid domain overhead I did try creating a local account on both boxes with the same username and password – thus enabling automatic password matching and it should have worked fine. It didn’t – so don’t go there ;-)
On my install I provisioned the Application tier as a Domain Controller and configured it with all the defaults, I then added the Database tier server to the domain created. Then created a user which was a member of the Domain Administrators group (as per the install instructions)
When you come to install ADAM you find that the SSL port the install instructions ask you to specify (the default) is already in use (by the Domain Server), this is fine keep the suggested number and carry on with the install.
Hopefully this helps! – If you haven’t got 2GB ram on your laptop and your running this on VPCs you best get an upgrade
