VS/TFS 2008 SP1 – Installation Tips

Well, Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 (VS 2008 SP1) has been out (RTM’d) for about three days now and several tips have materialized across the Visual Studio community that may help save you some time.  These tips are broken out into Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio.

Updating Team Foundation Server 2008

• When upgrading a Team Foundation Server, Installation order is important (read the installation guide).  As per the guide, “In deployments where the application tier and a client tier component are installed on the same computer, you must install SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 before you install SP1 for Team Foundation Server. Otherwise, you will not be able to install SP1 for Team Foundation Server.”
• If you upgrade from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 but do not install SP1 after the upgrade, Team Foundation Server will no longer function.
• If you have Visual Studio 2008 installed on your application-tier server and you want to install SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 you must also install TFS 2008 SP1.  If you install only one service pack, you will create an unsupported configuration.
• If you have a standby application-tier server, you must install SP1 on the standby application-tier server if you install it on the primary server.
• In order to update client components such as Team Explorer, you must install SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 – SP1 for Team Foundation Server 2008 includes only server updates and does not update Team Explorer.

Updating Visual Studio 2008

• If you are upgrading from SP1 Beta, be sure to run the Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack Preparation Tool before you install the RTM version of SP1.  This utility cleans up several items, including:
  • Microsoft Silverlight Tools Beta 1
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – KB949325
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – KB944899 (v1)
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – KB945140 (SP1 Beta)

Miscellaneous

• If you’re having issues downloading VS 2008 SP1 on a network that uses Microsoft ISA Server, take a look at this post.
• As per this post:
  • If you get a Windows Update prompt to reboot during the installation of SP1, ignore it.  Wait until the SP1 installation is complete and then reboot.
  • If you have a pre-release of the Team System for Database Development GDR (that supports SQL Server 2008) installed, you will need to uninstall and reinstall after upgrading to SP1.
  • You can’t create the admin mode/slipstream TFS installer when running on a 64-bit OS.  TFS will be supported on 64-bit operating systems with the “Rosario” release.