When I come to a customer site, I often have to help them get setup with TFS (Team Foundation Server) 2010, Microsoft’s source code control / ALM (application lifecycle management) system. This is so they can work with their BIDS (Business Intelligence Developer Studio) projects as a team, giving the added benefit of source code control. I’ve had to do this often enough I wanted to record the steps for my own use, and hopefully others too.
Installing the TFS 2010 tools for Visual Studio / BIDS 2008
First off, thanks to Derek Miller for covering most of the steps involved in his blog post http://derekjmiller62.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/using-tfs-2010-with-bids-2008/. I won’t go into the detail he did, but will summarize into these basic steps.
1. If you haven’t installed Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1, do so by downloading it and installing.
2. Next, you will need to install the Visual Studio 2008 Team Explorer.
3. After installing Team Explorer, you will have to go back and reinstall VS SP1 (from step 1). Don’t skip this step! Team explorer has some older components that overwrite the SP1 components, and you will have reinstall them.
Now this next part I really haven’t seen anywhere else and was a real pain to find, and thus is the main reason for this post. During the SP1 install, we often see “Visual Studio SP1 Installation Failed”. Checking the error log, buried deep you will find “Returning IDOK. INSTALLMESSAGE_ERROR [Error 2902. An internal error has occurred. …”
When you see this, go to your Control Panel, and then to Add Remove Programs. Look for a program called “Microsoft Visual Studio Web Authoring Component” and uninstall it. This is actually installed as part of the Office suite, and you don’t really need it since you likely have much more powerful web authoring tools, or since you are doing BI development won’t be doing an web development in Microsoft Office.
After uninstalling it, SP1 should then install, and you are ready for step 4.
4. Install the Visual Studio Team System 2008 SP1 Forward Compatibility Update for Team Foundation Server 2010. That probably took you longer to read than it actually will to install. After installing, it may prompt you to reboot. Even if it doesn’t ask you should reboot anyway, we’ve seen a few times when we weren’t able to connect until we rebooted.
After that you should be able to go into Visual Studio and go to Tools, Connect to Team Foundation Server. If you still have problems connecting, I will refer you to Derek’s post where he describes some registry entries you can try. So far we haven’t found them necessary, but you may.
Installing the TFS 2010 Tools
Note that there is one big limitation to using TFS 2010 with VS2008. You can connect to a TFS site and upload your solutions and projects, but you can’t create a new team site with VS2008. To do so, you will need the VS2010 shell with the TFS components, a free download.
Installing TFS 2010 for SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
Now that you have BIDS all setup to work with TFS, it only makes sense to make your SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) also work with TFS. Joseph Jun has a great blog post that goes into all the nitty gritty of how to do this. The short version though, is after you install the TFS 2010 tools in the step above (and they are a prerequisite) you need to install the Team Foundation Server MSSCCI Provider 2010.
After the install, you should see a new Source Control menu option under the File menu in SSMS. From here you can launch the TFS 2010 management shell or open an existing SSMS project / solution. If you have a solution you need to add, simply right click on the solution in the Solution Explorer window and pick Add to Source Control.
Visual Studio Database Projects
Note that if you are using Visual Studio Database Projects, any SQL Server 2008R2 development must be done in Visual Studio 2010. VS2010 is already setup to talk to TFS 2010. If you are using VS 2008 database projects to build a SQL Server 2008 (non-R2) database, then with the steps above you should be good to go for checking in your database project into TFS.
And away we go!
And with that you should be setup to manage your BI Development in Team Foundation Server 2010. It’s a lot of work, but well worth the effort. Using TFS will let your BI staff work as a team to develop projects. Additionally you have the benefit of source code control, something invaluable in the case of package corruptions or needing to track history.