Visual Studio Team Foundation B3 Setup Issue #2: TFSService account!

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My second issue with the TFS B3 experience came after setup.

When I attempted to create a new project, it died at the SharePoint stage.

As it turns out, when VSTF was installing, it changed the IIS Application Pool identity for the “SharePoint Central Administration” site from StsAdminAppPool to a custom created application pool running under the identity of TfsService.

This is cool, as TfsService is part of the STS_WPG and IIS_WPG groups, however, I hadn’t added TfsService to the domain administrators group (for some reason, I never thought to do this when I created the user). This causes any type of WSS action to fail on behalf of TfsService as the SharePoint web services are being invoked by the app pool identity during project creation (to create the project portal site). The failure happens when TfsService is trying to execute aspects of the .NET framework without local administrator privileges, and dies.

So in short, make sure your TfsService account also belongs to the local administrators group.

Otherwise, I have VSTS RC0 running on my laptop, and VSTF B3 as a single-server install on a VPC, and all is running nicely (and quite fast too).

I also noticed apart from the new look of the screens that:

  • the user security functionality has been cleaned up dramatically
  • it runs allot faster than the B2
  • the report views in the Project Portal still don’t work (I haven’t gone on to see why or resolve the issue) 

Will keep you’ll posted as I continue my discovery into B3!