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Migrating from VSS 2005 to TFS 2010 using VSSConverter -- Missing Instructions

Megan BrooksSQL Server Consultant
Retired SQL Server database developer and administrator; active MS SQL Server consultant for T-SQL, SSRS, and SSIS
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If you have have been using Visual Studio 2008 with VSS and are now migrating to Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server, you may need to migrate your VSS data to TFS.  Microsoft has made VS 2010 TFS available to VS2008 with MSDN subscribers and advised that TFS is the replacement for VSS.  There is a TFS "basic" configuration that is suitable for use by individuals and small teams that do not need all the features of TFS 2010, and TFS performance can be much better than VSS, so this is a good thing.

The problem I ran into is that I couldn't find complete instructions about how to do the migration.  It turned out that all of the instructions I found by searching were for earlier versions of TFS.  I used this article:

      Walkthrough: Migrating from Visual SourceSafe to Team Foundation
      http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181247(VS.80).aspx

which is apparently for the original TFS (2005) release.

Actually, the instructions seem to be fine except for one small detail -- when you add the <Settings> element to ConversionSettings.xml there is one additional (and seemingly undocumented) attribute that TFS requres. The old format was

<Settings>
    <TeamFoundationServer name="server_name" port="port_number" protocol="protocol"></TeamFoundationServer>
</Settings>

The new (and correct) format is:

<Settings>
    <TeamFoundationServer name="server_name" port="port_number" protocol="protocol" collection="virtual_root/collection_name"></TeamFoundationServer>
</Settings>

By default the virtual_root/collection_name would be "tfs/DefaultCollection".  Once I added that attribute, everything else went well. My final <Settings> element looked like

<Settings>
                          <TeamFoundationServer name="server_name" port="8080" protocol="http" collection="tfs/DefaultCollection"></TeamFoundationServer>
                      </Settings>

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One other thing that was documented (sort of) but that I overlooked is that while the instructions seemed to say that you need to install SQL Server Express before running the conversion, apparently you actually can use SQL Server instead.  Reading all of the instructions will save you that extra work. This article shows how to do it:

    How to: Create a Settings File for Source Control Analysis and Migration
    http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms253161(v=VS.80).aspx
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Megan BrooksSQL Server Consultant
Retired SQL Server database developer and administrator; active MS SQL Server consultant for T-SQL, SSRS, and SSIS

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