Snowball - The Blog

One of the new features of the 2010 platform, is the ability to install Team Foundation Server on a client OS, like Vista or Windows 7, 32 or 64 bit. It runs on SQL Express as database, which if not installed on your machine, will be installed by the setup configuration of TFS.

My personal setup is going to be a virtual machine in which I install TFS Basic. From my host OS, which has VS2010 installed along with Team Explorer, I can easily connect to it.

In this post, I wanted to show how easy it is to get things running on a Windows 7 (virtual) machine.

1. Installing Team Foundation Server

The installation for TFS basic is the same as for the fully-featured version. Run setup.exe from the disk (32bit or 64bit, depending on your OS).

You should see the following wizard.

By default, nothing is checked. Check the Team Foundation components checkbox.

2. Configuration of TFS so that it will become TFS Basic

At this point, things have been installed, but nothing is running yet. The configuration wizard should start up, as shown in the following screenshot.

Now we get the choice to either install basic, advanced, application tier or upgrade. Select upgrade and click on Start Wizard. This wizard will now guide you through the required steps. On my machine, SQL Server Express 2008 was already installed, so the wizard skipped this installation.

The wizard will now check if all my selections are possible with my config. If so, we can continue.

Success, we’re good to go!

Installation has started.

Finished setting up everything…

TFS Basic is ready, here’s the address of your personal TFS Basic server.

3. Team Explorer is called to the scene

To use my TFS instance from Visual Studio, I need to install Team Explorer. It can be found on the installation iso from TFS. Run its setup.

Installing…

And complete!

4. Visual Studio 2010 now with Team Explorer

In Visual Studio’s Team Explorer, click on Connect with Team Project. Add your server as shown below:

From File > New Team Project, you can start a new team project.

And there we have it, a completely configured system with Visual Studio 2010 and TFS Basic!