Considering the number of Innovations, new features, revolutions, and more introduced by Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010, I’ve decided (because I’m the Boss of the Dev team) to migrate our small development team immediately after the RTM become available.
Last wednesday we updated all our components, built and released all our projects, made a copy on development machines of all things contained in the TFS Scource control and started.
The operations we did to upgrade the server from TFS 2008 Workgroup to TFS 2010 were the following:
- Backup of all TFS databases
- Stop of SQL Server
- Phisical copy of all TFS Databases
Having already installed the TFS on a SQL Server 2008 we didn’t have the task to upgrade the server from SQL 2005 but we verified both the Windows Server 2003 Standard OS of the machine and SQL Server 2008 got all the needed patches.
Then, not being rich enough to buy a new server, we went on with upgrade doing the following:
- Uninstall Visual Studio 2008, Team Explorer, TFS 2008 and all things connected to them from the server.
- Restart and check if there were patches needed prior to install 2010.
- Installed Visual Studio 2010 on the server.
- Installed TFS 2010 on the server, configured the TFS throungh the configuration wizard, telling it which was the previous TFS database, and some options, like the name of the new project collection for the converted projects.
- Installed Team Explorer on the server.
And magically, everything was working.
Simultaneously, we uninstalled Visual Studio 2008 and installed Visual Studio 2010 on the Developers machines, Installed Team Explorer and all was working correctly. Users, permissions and access to the projects were working correctly.
We then spent 2 days converting and recompiling all projects and adjusting some things on builds (all relative to the Setup builds) but we had no big troubles at all.
After the conversion to VS2010 what we developers noticed first is that Builds on dev machines are perceptibly faster and the improvements in the User interface of the Development environment together with a gazilion of extensions let us made imediately our environment comfortable.
If you still have doubts “Upgrade or not upgrade that’s the question” feel free to ask, but that’s our experience.