Today I got round to upgrading our TFS 2008 (dual server setup) with Team Server 2008 SP1. I tried it first on my demo VPC I use for presentations (reminder I am at VBug Coventry at the end of the talking about TFS, a free event open to all). Anyway, this update went fine and did not take too long, 5 or 10 minutes.

On the main system all seemed to go OK, but it did take around 45 minutes. I assumed the time it takes is dependant on volume of data in the DB, some sort of schema update I guess.

All seemed to go OK, I got no errors and after the upgrade I am able to manage work items, check in and out etc. However, there is one problem, in Team Explorer (I was on the server console) I saw a red cross next to the Reports sections in all team projects.

The interesting part was that if I copied the URL from the properties window for the Reports and pasted it into a browser it works without error and without being prompted for any login details. So I assumed that there is no issue with the Reporting services or authentication (also the links in Team Explorer had worked prior to the update). As another check,  we use eScrum process template  and it’s associated web site could accessing the Reporting services without any errors. It all pointed to a problem inside the Team System client.

When I tried to create a new team project there was also a problem. It failed with the error:

TF30224: Failed to retrieve projects from the report server.

I google’d around a bit to no real effect, all the people who had seen this error before turned out to have rights issues in Reporting Services, mine were fine.

I then had a thought, I had not upgraded the VS2008 Team Explorer on the server (the Team Server SP1 update does not include this). I therefore ran the VS2008 SP1 update, rebooted the server and low and behold the error went away.

So the technical tip is - if you put TFS 2008 SP1 on a server make sure you also updated the Team Explorer clients to SP1. If you don’t you will probably be OK doing day to days source control and work item editing, but expect problems creating new projects.