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Register Now For Team Foundation Server 2013 Upgrade Weekend

  • Článek

In my job, I get talk to people every day who are excited about the new and improved capabilities of Team Foundation Server 2013. I have talked to several organizations who are already running Team Foundation Server 2013 Preview in production, which is great. But for some organizations, upgrading to pre-release software on their production servers can be a bit scary. If you are interested in upgrading to Team Foundation Server 2013 and you don’t want to wait until RTM, we are here to help.

Team Foundation Server 2013 Upgrade Weekend is happening September 13-15 (Friday – Sunday). During this weekend, Microsoft experts will be standing by after hours to provide no-charge assistance for Team Foundation Server 2013 installation, configuration, and upgrades. If you are interested in taking advantage of Upgrade Weekend, please visit https://aka.ms/TFSUpgradeWeekend. This brief survey will pre-register you to take advantage of the Upgrade Weekend offer and will help us to appropriately staff engineering and support resources. If you don’t yet have a profile on Microsoft Connect you will need to complete a brief Connect registration profile prior to accessing the survey. This survey will remain open until September 6th.

Here are just a few reasons to consider upgrading to Team Foundation Server 2013:

 

Of course, you don’t have to wait until Upgrade Weekend to try Team Foundation Server 2013 or any of the rest of the products in the Visual Studio 2013 family. You can download previews of these products today from https://aka.ms/GetVS2013. All of these products have “go live” licenses which means you can run them in production and perform your day-to-day development activities with them. You can also contact Microsoft Support if you need assistance.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 27, 2013
    So why are you guys having an upgrade weekend and upgrading folks to NON release versions of the software...last time I checked your previews have time outs that will cause the software to stop working....will you guys have someone of extending those timeouts indefinitely without upgrading and having system down time?

  • Anonymous
    August 27, 2013
    Hi Kevin, I appreciate your concerns. Microsoft Support already offers normal worldwide support for released (RTM) products. In fact, most installation / upgrade related incidents are no-charge for RTM products. For pre-release software such as the stage TFS 2013 is in currently, we typically only provide email support M-F 9-5 (Pacific Standard Time). For people who are interested in going live with the pre-release bits, Upgrade Weekend provides them with extended hours coverage when they can schedule their upgrades then call in and get support via the phone, Lync screen sharing, or email. Furthermore, our expectation is that once somebody upgrades to a TFS pre-release, moving to the RTM release of that version of TFS is going to be fairly straightforward. The number of steps required in such an upgrade are typically minimal and mostly automated. This is a pilot and thank your voicing your feedback. If Upgrade Weekend goes well this is something we may consider for RTM upgrades as well. Should I interpret your question to mean that you would be interested in such an offering if it were made available for TFS 2013 RTM? Brian

  • Anonymous
    August 28, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 28, 2013
    Thanks for the dialog, Kevin. When I say "mostly automated" what I'm referring to is that if you've already upgraded to a TFS 2013 pre-release and taken care of any manual steps identified during that process, then the TFS 2013 RTM installation wizard should just take care of the rest. One such example of this is upgrading custom process templates from an older TFS deployment. In most cases the TFS 2013 install wizard will now automatically add the new fields and workflow states to take advantage of new features and capabilities. Depending on the customizations you've made, you might have to manually adjust this XML. If you do it once for TFS 2013 preview, you shouldn't need to do this again when you move to TFS 2013 RTM. Another such example is upgrading to the requisite version of software dependencies such as SQL Server and Windows. Once you get on the supported versions during the pre-release (if you aren't already on the supported versions) then you won't have to do it again to move to RTM. The pre-release software will continue to have an expiration date built into it. The only software which won't have the expiration is RTM. Upgrading from a pre-release version to RTM will also have some downtime associated with it. Upgrading to pre-release software certainly isn't for everyone, and in your case it sounds like it may not be the best fit with your organization. I love that you are interested in the idea of running an Upgrade Weekend in the RTM timeframe, and assuming this pilot goes well that will help us justify future such offerings. Thanks again, Brian

  • Anonymous
    August 28, 2013
    Thanks Brain. Sounds like the usual upgrade mess....so I'll just tell our engineering groups we will have to wait till RTM to upgrade our Production TFS instance. Several of the groups have already setup 2013 TFS servers to test with, and they've heavily changed the 2013 OOB process template workflows/states/fields/forms and we now have several custom serverside event handlers to do rollup calculations and workflow transformations (we brough in 2 MVP consultants in July for two weeks). I know we've experimented quite a bit with the In Release preview as well. When you guys do RTM 2013 will the preview versions of In Release be upgraded to RTM in an automated process as well. The downtime part is killer and will mean we will need to more than likely have to upgrade at a later date....but I know we want to move to 2013 like yesterday. :-(

  • Anonymous
    August 28, 2013
    Hi Kevin, I know that unlike the rest of the 2013 preview bits, we don't license or support the current InRelease 2013 preview bits for production. So I don't know what the story will be for upgrading the InRelease preview to RTM, but I will ask and report back. Can you help me understand how you typically schedule TFS upgrades? Most of my customers are looking at TFS Upgrade Weekend as a way to upgrade without any downtime because they can do it on the weekend outside of normal business hours. But I think I hear you saying that any downtime for the server is going to impact your business. Is that because you are a 24x7 dev shop? Or because you don't have resources to support an after-hours upgrade? I'm just trying to understand the various customer profiles out there so that we can put together more helpful programs like this in the future. Brian

  • Anonymous
    August 28, 2013
    Thanks Brian, we kick off our builds and automated tests to start running at 8pm on Friday, our builds take between 21-26 hours to run, we kick off a series of buildA depends on buildB, BuildB depends on BuildC, etc etc for a list of about 71 builds. We also have our automated codedui tests, web tests, and load tests running over the weekend (from Satuday evening through Sunday) for another 18-19 hours, we have to date ~2900 automated tests. We have ~14 people in India that come in on Monday (our Sunday) and start work too. Our total dev group is 42 people. We schedule our maintainance windows to have downtime every quarter of less than 4 hours (4 server reboots thanks to patch tueday), so in scheduling an upgrade to TFS 2013 we need to find a way to do it and that minimizes impact to our build process and test processes (as waiting for them to kick off again means a week of destablization and possible missed test coverage  regressions). We know we need to upgrade to TFS 2013...and we'll probably eat a weekend to do the upgrade...but it's a once a year / once every other year kind of event....and from what your saying we'd have to have another downtime if we installed in september. But if I can make the case that RTM (whenever that is going to be) is stable and we can have MS on the phone for their entire weekend for free....that'd help me get to TFS 2013 sooner as our engineering groups want it...like yesterday. I just know in testing TFS 2013 preview the engineering teams have found numerous issues with failed builds with custom activities and failed automated lab management builds as well...

  • Anonymous
    August 28, 2013
    Thanks Kevin, this is helpful context to have. Sounds like you guys run a very tight ship and I can understand now why you were asking all of the questions you were. This is good data for me to take into our discussions around possibly holding an Upgrade Weekend for RTM. On the upside, I'm very glad to hear that your devs want TFS 2013 "yesterday" - that's always good to hear.

  • Anonymous
    August 28, 2013
    You guys should have shipped the 2013 stuff in 2012. Honestly, you're a year late on the GIT stuff. But I'll take it as soon as I can get my hands on it. Now if only you guys would have Chef and Puppet integration. There's a long list of stuff we need in order to stay on TFS...so every bit you guys add helps! Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger...

  • Anonymous
    August 29, 2013
    Any idea on if / how VS 2005 clients like BIDs will be able to access TFS 2013 if we upgrade? Is there a new version of MSSCCI going to be available for Windows XP?

  • Anonymous
    September 01, 2013
    Scott, Sorry for the delay, I've been checking into this one. The MSSCCI provider is expected to be published "soon" but I don't know if it will make it before Upgrade Weekend. The link to that provider from the MSDN docs (msdn.microsoft.com/.../dd997788(v=vs.120).aspx) is actually pointing to an unpublished download at the moment (go.microsoft.com/fwlink), but I'm told that once it's available that link should start working. Sorry for the confusion. Brian

  • Anonymous
    September 09, 2013
    Oh, bummer. 2013 RC looks nice but we need the MSSCI provider for BIDS (SSIS/SSRS). Will it be available by friday so we can upgrade this weekend to TFS 2013?

  • Anonymous
    September 10, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 14, 2013
    So how's the upgrade weekend going? How many upgrades took place? How successful was the event? Will you be doing this again for when 2013 releases (RTM)?

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2013
    Nigel, it's been pretty quiet. We helped resolve some issues yesterday but we have mostly felt like the Maytag Repairman. Could be a sign that the upgrades are going smoothly or that people decided not to migrate this weekend. We're hoping to learn more from a survey which will go out this week.

  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2013
    Any chance you guys with channel9 could have a live session where we could screen share with Google hangout to do an upgrade? We missed this weekend...but we need to get to TFS 2013 by November 22.

  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2013
    Kenneth, no to Channel 9 live (that's not the right format for this and is very expensive to host and stream) and no to Google hangout (umm, we have competing products <g>). Sorry you missed TFS Upgrade Weekend. We effectively did what you describe where we opened a Lync bridge and let people come and go, sharing their screens, etc. to help them through upgrades.

  • Anonymous
    September 19, 2013
    Brain during your support did you have to upgrade any custom WITControls written for TFS 2012 web access that didn't work when the customer upgraded to TFS 2013? We have about a dozen custom WIT Controls for web access and I can't find out what I need to do to upgrade them to TFS 2013. Any info/steps?

  • Anonymous
    September 19, 2013
    Bill, this didn't come up during Upgrade Weekend. I'm not familiar with the upgrade process for these myself but I've sent around some feelers to find out. Have you tried to upgrade to TFS 2013 RC and you are experiencing issues, or are you asking proactively prior to the upgrade? (And if the former, can you provide some context about the specific issues you are seeing?)

  • Anonymous
    October 01, 2013
    Brian did you find anything out about how to upgrade custom WITControls? It appears we have to recompile each WIT Control with new references to 2013 dlls...just wondering if there was some easier way.

  • Anonymous
    October 01, 2013
    Bill, I didn't, sorry. A recompile with references to the new DLL's sounds pretty typical for this type of upgrade when I've looked at this in the past.

  • Anonymous
    October 17, 2013
    Will there be an upgrade weekend for the RTM, now that it is released? =D