TFS 2008 Build, the major improvement

What's new in TFS 2008 ?

Besides the performance, scale, Workspace mapping and the many UI improvements, TFS 2008 brings some new features mostly for Team Build.
It provides Continuous Integration and Scheduled Builds out of the box, Multi-Threaded and Incremental Builds.

Builds can be created, updated, stopped and deleted easily using the improved UI. You can also integrate Team build with existing build systems like Nant, Ant, make, etc.

The following chart displays Team Build compatibility between TSF 2005 and TFS 2008 versions.

In addition to that both TeamExplorer can be installed in VSTS 2005, only VSTE 2008 will allow you to access all TeamBuild functionalities within TFS 2008.

GUI tool for VssConverter

Well, there's a UI for Vss to TFS convertion available now.

I haven't tested it yet, but it seems worthy to try...Those who are interested can get it from here.

VSS to TFS Source Control migration

Team Foundation Server (commonly abbreviated TFS) is a Microsoft offering for source control, data collection, reporting, and project tracking, intended for collaborative software development projects. It is available either as stand-alone software, or as the server side backend platform for Visual Studio Team System(VSTS).

As Visual Source Safe is targeted towards individual developers or small teams with lightweight SCM needs, Microsoft is encouraging everyone else to migrate to the more sophisticated Team Foundation system.

There's a command line tool provided by TFS 2005 to migrate from VSS to TFS and is called VssConverter . The VSSConverter.exe is located in :\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE and is also available through the Visual Studio 2005 Command Prompt.

Due differences between this two technologies VSS historical information cannot be migrated. Basically, TFS source control does not support Sharing and Pinning. Because of this, Sharing, Branching (Sharing is a pre-condition of Branching) and Pinning historical information is lost when migrating to TFS source control.

Also, time stamps and source control bindings are not migrated.

Despite this limitations VssConverter.exe does a great job but it requires a lot of XML configuration.

The VSS Converter requires Microsoft Visual SourceSafe 2005 or a later version to run.

Want TFS 2005 to support WSS 3.0 ?

As you may know, TFS 2005 release relies on Sharepoint Services 2.0 for team site integration among other things.
I was looking for a way to allow my TFS 2005 to support WSS 3.0 since this new release has enhanced integration and new features.

Interested in WSS 3.0 ? here you can learn about what it brings to us.

There's a way to achieve this upgrade by applying a hotfix to TFS, but some prior steps have to be made.

All information is available here.