Accessing TFS2010 from Visual Studio 2008

I have run several times into a question: Can I (How Do I) connect to TFS2010 from Visual Studio 2008? The answer is YES you can, and here what you need to do:

1. Make sure that Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 has been installed

2. Download and install Visual Studio Team System 2008 Service Pack 1 Forward Compatibility Update for TFS 2010.

3. Configure connection to your TFS server.

In TFS2010 we now have ability to host multiple collections, groups of Team Project, so as result when accessing to TFS2010 we need to know what collection we are interested in.

General TFS connection constructed like:

http(s)://{Server Name}:{Port}/{Directory}/{Collection Name}

where as:

• {Server Name}, either the name of the server TFS2010 installed on (application tier) or Fully Qualify Domain Name that would resolve to the location of your TFS server
• {Port }, the port configured for TFS access
• {Path}, the path to installed TFS services
• {Collection Name}, name of TFS Team Collection

If you have installed TFS2010 following default suggestions it would be something like that: http://{Server Name}:8080/tfs/DefaultCollection

For example if you have downloaded VS2010 RTM Virtual Machine from Brian Keller’s blog then you can access TFS server from VS2008 by configuring connection string as:

4. But there are limitations on what you can do from Visual Studio 2008 Team Explorer with TFS2010, some of the big ones:

• Creating new Projects
• Working with Hierarchical WorkItem Queries
• Managing Builds
• Reports
• etc

Due to all the new features made to TFS2010.