How to upgrade TFS 2005 to TFS 2008?

Question

What is the best way to go about upgrading TFS 2005 to 2008? Also, what about the Team Build scripts ("Build Types"), are those compatible with Team Build 2008 or do they need converted/migrated somehow?

Answer 1

On this post on Upgrading TFS 2005 to 2008 I mentioned that the SharePoint upgrade to 3.0 was the main difficulty. I thought it was performed as part of the upgrade, but it in fact is a separate upgrade process. You should also install Team Explorer 2008 before installing Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 on developer's machines. If you don't, you have to go back and reinstall the service pack. Also be sure to get the SP1 RTM version, which MS just release in the past week or so. If you have already installed the SP1Beta, then you have to download a special removal tool, run that, then install SP1 RTM. We did not have any custom build types, but we did use a custom build guidance package from Conchango - and it upgraded OK.

Answer 2

Call your local MS rep and see if they will pony up the money for consultants to do this. There is a cottage industry out there just for upgrading from 2005/2008 and MS is sometimes the money to have some of these done for customers.

Never hurts to ask.

Answer 3

First and foremost - backup everything! The databases, the machine itself... You can never be too careful.

I was able to upgrade the TFS installation at my company by using these resources:

http://olausson.net/blog/CommentView,guid,6f97b619-a5ac-41af-a908-f099d49a3b16.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/sudhir/archive/2007/05/31/upgrade-2005-with-wss2-0-to-orcas-wss3-0.aspx http://weblogs.asp.net/dmckinstry/archive/2007/08/27/considerations-on-using-tfs-2008-with-visual-studio-2005.aspx

It's not that hard and can in fact be done in a couple of hours, with better luck.

Answer 4

Simply, follow the guidance in the Install document for TFS 2008 - It has an upgrade section. It talks about backing up databases and so on already. The instructions are clear and layed out well.