TFS 2010 SP1 Upgrade

It took 8 hours, but we’ve finally got our TFS system upgraded to TFS 2010 SP1 from TFS 2008 SP1. I've been critical of them in the past, but with 2010, I would say MS greatly improved the upgrade process. I really like how they separated installing the bits from doing the migration. And when we did run into an issue, we were amazed that when we re-ran the install (after correcting our issue), the upgrade wizard started off where we ran into issues.

This all being said, as much as this experience was better than our TFS 2005, TFS 2008 and TFS 2008 SP1 upgrades we did run into issues - primarily ours. Here they are.

1) We had to install VS 2010 Ultimate on each build machine. I didn’t dig into this much, but apparently our testers use “Web Tests” during the smoke test phase of our builds. These “Web Tests” apparently require the VS 2010 Ultimate install. Again, this is not really my area of expertise so we went ahead with the request and dumped Ultimate on 30 build hosts.

2) We ran into an issue where our drive for logs (100gig) filled up. This did not happen the first two times we did test upgrades, but as luck would happen, when we tried to go live, this issue popped up. We paged the DBA to have our log files truncated. We were really nervous that we’d have to go through the entire migration again. However, much to our surprise, the upgrade started right where it left off. A wonderful surprise!!! Thanks Microsoft!!!

3) We had some problems with the encryption of our Reporting Services View State. A colleague of mine came across this link which states – “If your application is installed http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifin a Web farm, you need to change the validationKey from AutoGenerate,IsolateApps to a specific manually generated key value”. After making this change, our encryption problems were solved.

4) We had some sporadic issues getting people re-connected (mainly use error), but nothing significant.

5) Make sure your users get Visual Studio 2010 SP1. Some power users who branch from labels, found that the ability to branch on a label from a folder that was already branched, was removed. (Say that 10 times fast!) VS 2010 SP1 adds that ability back into the client.

6) Make sure any VS 2008 users get this. This is so they can log into the 2010 server from a 2008 client. Visual Studio Team System 2008 SP1

Again, over all this experience was pretty damn good. I give MS an A- for this upgrade.