First look at VS2010 Beta 2 – not for everyday work yet! (at least not for me :)

My goal was to try VS2010B2 on one of the moderate size VS2008 solutions (44 projects). Migration went quite smoothly, although I had to re-add some dll references twice before they got copied into the binaries folder after the build. Overall everything was fast and quite functioning. Next step was to add solution to TFS2010.

I needed to install Team explorer 2010 Beta 2 - http://www.microsoft.com/downLoads/details.aspx?familyid=CA86215B-A824-44E7-B4C3-982C7ECEA46D&displaylang=en

After adding the solution to TFS2010B2 local build degraded and became unbelievably slow.
Intermittently, VS sees TFS as not available, looses credentials I’m logged under, next start goes offline and build becomes faster at those occasions. Then again, after few attempts to go online and few messages that account I used doesn’t have required permissions, out of a sudden I’m able to go online. Brrrr.

[Note, 29-Jan-2010] Good to know that MS is working on vs2010 performance issues: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2010/01/24/state-of-vs-2010-performance.aspx

At that stage I decided just to use the old VS2008 with TFS2010. Forward compatibility patch for VS2008 to work with TFS2010B2 can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=cf13ea45-d17b-4edc-8e6c-6c5b208ec54d

I spent some time figuring out the url for DefaultCollection in tfs2010, at the end it was just https://x.y.com:port/tfs, change x.y.com and http(s), port portions to be applicable for your case. Most important thing is that you don’t need to provide DefaultCollection at the end.

After same trick for solution file as for vs2008/5, by changing:

Microsoft Visual Studio Solution File, Format Version 11.00
# Visual Studio 2010

to

Microsoft Visual Studio Solution File, Format Version 10.00
# Visual Studio 2010

I got everything working with few notes only. One of the things was that when you attempt to add System.Core in VS2010B2 (if you are using Func<T> etc.) it tells you that it is already internally added. Though in VS2008 you have to add it manually. I really preferred the explicit way of telling what references are (so I guess now System.Core has upgraded to the meaning of mscorlib).

Overall I found VS2010B2 way too raw to be a reliable tool when I need to release things few times a day. As for TFS2010 – for few days of work there is no single issue to mention. My choice for now will be experimental VS2010B2 backed up by reliable VS2008 with both using TFS2010B2.