It's May Day Bank Holiday Weekend so I was going to try and stay away from the blog but after a testing afternoon with the new Team System Beta I thought I'd better share.

Firstly the install. I created a new Virtual PC image of Win2k3 SP1 to install the Team Foundation Server on. What the install guide doesn't tell you is that if you turn a server into a domain controller after installing Internet Services then the web won't work. You only find this out after installing SharePoint Services and following the troubleshooting guide when things don't work. After reinstalling SharePoint, Reporting Services and Internet Services things looked better and the Team Foundation install worked first time which was much better than my Beta 1 experience. However, after install, Analysis Services and Internet Services are hammering the CPU for no reason that I can determine. Installing the Visual Studio client was just as frustrating as the Beta 1 uninstall doesn’t clean up too well. After a couple of failed attempts I found this tool to clean up before installing.

Connection to the Foundation Server worked first time but failed to create a portfolio project complaining that the methodology could not be found. I haven't been able to get any further with this. The non-team bits do pretty much exactly what it says on the tin although the Intellisense is a little aggressive. The performance stuff also works well but the testing tools crashed the development environment every time I tried to run a test. This maybe due to the installation difficulties but I can't tell. Time to put it all back in the box and wait for the release I think.