Last weekend I did a full upgrade on my computers to Windows 8. Along with that, came the upgrade of Visual Studio 2012 and SQL Server 2012, and Team Foundation Server 2012. My plan was to have a completely fresh development environment, with no legacy 2010, 2008, 2005 versions.
This was a good plan, but I had one reservation. In this year, I converted from Visual Source Safe to TFS 2010, and now I was going to have to upgrade again to TFS 2012. Everyone understands how to manage a big file system structure like VSS, but TFS might be a mystery. Actually, it’s much easier. It’s just two SQL databases. So I backed up those databases and did my full, fresh install.
Now I’m ready to install TFS 2012, but what about my data? I’d seen many blogs and articles describing the upgrade process. Every one said, uninstall TFS 2010, then install TFS 2012. But I didn’t want to have any TFS 2010 bits on the new install. So in order to get the database instance to restore my TFS 2010 data, I installed TFS 2012, then uninstalled it. Then I restored my TFS 2010 data into the SQLEXPRESS instance TFS created. Finally, I reinstalled TFS 2012, selecting the “Upgrade” option, which converted my TFS 2010 data to the new schema.
Sounds like a roundabout solution but it worked without any problems and without resorting to older product installs.