Team Foundation Workgroup Edition

The installation guide has to be followed step by step if you don't want to run into all kinds of trouble. At the start of the installation, a health check is run to check all prerequisites. Although I'm running a pretty powerful laptop (1.86 GHz - 2 GB of RAM), I was warned that my system did not meet all system requirements for installing Team Foundation Server. System Requirements are 2.2 GHz Pentium IV!

The first thing I did was creating the required TFS accounts (TFSSETUP, TFSSERVICES, TFSREPORTS) on my system. I used local user accounts for running setup and services. I wish I had used domain user accounts. More on this later ...

After that, I installed IIS, SQL Server 2005, Sharepoint Services, some hotfixes and eventually Team Foundation Server. It's handy to know you can install Microsoft SQL Server 2005 from the command line using the provided answer file. This answer file automates setup to install and configure Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for use with Team Foundation Server. It saves you at least some time and clicks in the entire installation procedure.

So far so good. I almost had a working environment ... The only thing I still had to do was to add the appropriate user accounts (maximum 5 for Team Foundation Workgroup Edition) in the Team Foundation Licensed Users group. This is the point I come back to the use of the local user accounts for the installation. I wanted (of course) to add my domain account to this group so I could experiment from that account, but as you may predict : it didn't work ...

Received error :
Team Foundation Server could not resolve the user ... The user or group might be a member of a different domain, or the server might not have access to that domain. Verify the domain membership of the server and any domain trusts.

Apparently, only local user accounts may be added to this group and this is probably the result of the Team Foundation installation with the local user accounts. This is what I found in the installation guide ...

If you install Team Foundation Server using local user accounts for running setup and services, you cannot add domain user accounts to Team Foundation Server and they cannot create projects.

Rob Caron has posted this as following :

If you choose to install Team Foundation Server using workgroup accounts, you are limited to adding workgroup accounts as users when using Team Foundation Server. That is to say, you cannot add domain user accounts to Team Foundation Server that is using workgroup user accounts to run its services. The reason is fundamental; a service that is using a local workgroup user account logon cannot access a domain controller to authenticate a domain user account.

Ok, I can still work under a new local user account, but that was not my initial plan and I will be often forced to switch user accounts ... Damn! Decision time ... reinstall?! So I need those separate domain accounts on my corporate domain?! Could be interesting that other people can also connect to my Team Foundation Server ...

Something else that didn't work was the specification of the logon account for the Team Foundation Build Service during the install of Team Foundation Build. It's not possible to enter a local user account for the Service Account. Only Windows domain user accounts are allowed ...



Not quite finished yet! Any experiences with this?