Ok, so i haven't gotten any further on BizTalk walkthroughs now that it is installed and configured. Hopefully I will have some time soon. However, in between client projects I have been noodling with Visual Studio Team System (Team Foundation Server) installation and configuration.

First, Visual Studio improvements (and attendant .net framework changes) are awesome. The productivity enhancements are first rate, and really demonstrate serious developer input. As I get into more of that, hopefully I can spend time talking about it here.

On with Team System. I did a 2 server install (data and application) in a Windows 2003 domain. First annoyance is that reporting services seems to have to install directly on the box hosting SQL Server 2005. This is totally unncessary from a configuration perspective, so hopefully its a beta thing. It seems that MS methodology is going toward the application centric db that has a web server for web services. I suppose this makes some sense, but I can't get past my ingrained disklike for the mixing of these tiers. Extra config, extra security issues, extra blending of roles that confuses configuration. In any case, after installing IIS and Sharepoint services on my SQL Server I installed the data tier package. Easy enough. No problems.

I then installed the application package on my web server, and pointed it to the reporting server. Again, pretty smooth. I installed everything with the TFSInstall user, and made that user Admin on both boxes. This user is also setup to run the services, and the apppools, and the login to the reporting data sources. I will attempt to wean from this as configuration expertise increases. After the install completed and the reporting service seemed to work, and the web services on both boxes functioned, I removed theTFSInstall user from the admin role. To do this, I needed to give the user write access to %SystemRoot%/Temp, and to the temporary asp.net file folder in the framework folder so the appPools would function. I also gave the user permissions in the proper roles on the database, and database reporting service. I would be defeated in what seemed like an early victory very soon.

So, now the fun of configuration of the Team System from VS 2005 on my client machine. Opening the Team Explorer, I found and connected to my Team Server. Viola, so far so good. Then I selected "Create Project". I answered the wizard questions, and hit failure pretty quick. Unable to download the agile template. After some digging I found this was probably permissions related, so I gave TFSInstall its admin role again. Of course, the project could now be added without incident.

More later...