Busy week - July CTP Installed

 It’s been a busy week.  I just wrapped up a project where myself and the rest of my team installed and trained Team System beta 2 for a client.  By all accounts, things went well.  But it was a busy week and I have 2-3 more posts that I need to do.  But for now…

I’ve downloaded and installed the VSTS July CTP on some VPCs.   It seems to me that the install process is getting easier.  That might be me as I’ve done it a few times, but I can say some of the interdependencies have gone away.  I had one problem with the AD setup on my VPCs, but the installation on VSTS itself went as I would’ve hoped. 

If you’ve done a VSTS installation before, you know this…  If not, FOLLOW THE DIRECTIONS.  It is possible that you can get it to work by trying various unsupported configurations, but VSTS is a big product with a lot of moving parts, so get it to work using the documented process before fooling yourself into thinking it will be easy to cut a few corners.  (Oh, and if you do successfully cut a few corners, let the rest of us know! J)

One thing that I was encouraged by was the use of SQL 2005 as the back end for Windows Sharepoint Services.  This is an unsupported CTP product so they can get away with an unsupported configuration for WSS; nonetheless it is nice to see that they’re moving away from MSDE for the default WSS installation.

After the install, I had VS2005/Team Explorer up and running in no time.  They’ve done some minor cleaning and renaming (e.g., Permissions in the menus has become Security) in the user interface.  I spent a few minutes trying to import a custom Process Template that we built for a client and quickly learned that the UI didn’t have the only renames.  In the future I’ll try to post a map to move custom Process Templates from Beta 2 to July CTP of Team System.

I don’t expect anyone to actually MOVE to the July CTP, but I do expect the July CTP to be more like the final RTM than Beta 2.  Hopefully any blogging I do with the July CTP will be reusable when people move to the next supported release.  If you have more questions about whether to install the July CTP, check out these posts by Rob Caron, Jeff Beehler and Buck Hodges.  If you’d rather live vicariously through others who have installed it, I’ll try to keep blogging about it and let you know what I find.  Cheers!