In the past 13 years of working with Microsoft products, one of the embedded conceptions is that their applications, servers and other services don’t play well with others and based upon their history, perhaps it’s justified.
What’s interesting though is the change of conception with the Team Server Foundation 2010 service that we offer.
It would be natural to think that since Team Foundation Server 2010 would work well with their Visual Studio authoring platform and there’s very easy integration there but as we mentioned in our Using Team Foundation Server 2010 Source Control from SQL Server Management Studio post, there is a lot of extensibility and as surprising as it may seem, there’s even an effort to bridge cross-platform development that might occur during process development through Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 since one of the ideas that we’re being taught is that ideally, Team Foundation Server 2010 is meant to serve as a generic, collaborative source control solution.
Team Explorer Everywhere works with our service through a plug-in that Microsoft released for Eclipse which has been around for quite some time.
Eclipse is Java-based so if you intend to access the DiscountASP.NET Team Foundation Server 2010 service, you’ll need to make sure that you have a copy of the Java Runtime Environment available on your workstation. You can find the supported versions under the System Requirements section on the Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 download page and you can use the links below as a quick reference:
After you’ve installed the Java Runtime Environment, head over to the Eclipse web site and download Eclipse Classic. From what I’ve reviewed, you can also just install the Eclipse Platform Runtime but it’s not something that I was able to test directly for this review.
Once the Eclipse installation has completed, go to the Visual Studio Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 download page to obtain the 90-day trial version and download all three of the available files which are:
- InstallTEE.htm
- TEE-CLC-10.0.0.zip
- TFSEclipsePlugin-UpdateSiteArchive-10.0.0.zip
The file that you’ll want to open first is the InstallTEE.htm which has the plug-in installation instructions for the supported platforms.
The configuration process is very simple and when it’s time to connect to your DiscountASP.NET Team Foundation Server 2010 system, use the server information available on the Account Information page and connect as a user that you created through the Manage Users utility.
If you’re looking for more documentation, Microsoft recently updated their Help Center. Of course, you’re welcome to or if you have any other questions, post in the DiscountASP.NET Community Forum.
Let’s hope that the direction that Microsoft is taking with Team Foundation Server 2010 continues!