Nicolas is blogging and writes about team development and Microsoft.NET

TFS SP1 installation retrospect

After helping a few customers to install TFS SP1, I’d like to note some problems often occurring.

1. The SP installation package has some problems in dual server configurations and throws an error while installing. To avoid this problems, I always run the command line TFSQuiesce to shutdown all activities before installing.
2. When the original installation of TFS is run under a specific user (not a general “TFSSETUP” serivce account) and you try to install the SP with another user, you’ll probably get an Exception in the event log called something like this “Could not find stored procedure ‘dbo.GetAccountDisplayMode’” as described on the MSDN forums.
   This happens because the owner of the databases is someone else and the user which installed the SP maybe hasn’t enough rights and therefore the setup wasn’t able to change the DB schema.
   Uninstall the SP and try to run it again under the correct user.
3. Microsoft has published a hotfix for the issue where check-in event e-mail alert notifications don’t work well after TFS 2008 is configured to point use Work Item hyperlinks to Team System Web Access. Basically you create a subscription to the check-in events and the e-mail you get says this:
   “Details about this check-in were not available when this alert was prepared. Select the link above to view more details about the check-in.”
   You can download the hotfix from the MSDN Code Gallery.
4. The API for the Team Build capabilities has changed in the SP and therefore it is possible that your own build tasks don’t work anymore. You need to update the assembly references in your project and maybe change one or two lines of code