FAQ : How to setup Team Explorer?

Introduction

Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 Professional Editions do not come with Team Explorer. The Team Suite version comes with Team Explorer but not the professional version. If you have Visual Studio Professional Edition then you will need to install Team Explorer in order to access Team Foundation Server. Team explorer is available from Team Foundation Server 2005 DVD. It is also available from the Team Foundation Server 2008 DVD. Depending upon the version of Visual Studio you have, you may want to install the appropiate version of Team Explorer. There is not much difference between Team Explorer versions since they are just plug-ins into the IDE so if you go with either one of these versions you should be fine. Just stick the DVD in and run setup.exe. This should bring up an installation dialog box as shown below: 

On the screen shown above, please select Team Explorer and then click the link. [ For Visual Studio 2008 you have to click the install button]. Please take all default prompts during the installation. After the installation has been completed successfully, the Team menu should now be available but in a hidden state. Once you add a connection to your Team Foundation Server and select TFS as your source control plugin then you will see the Team menu. For the time being, you can verify that Team Explorer has been installed successfully by bring up the about dialog box in Visual Studio Help. This should work for Visual Studio 2008 also.

In order to setup TFS, Click on Tools > Options > Source Control and then select TFS as the source Control Plugin as shown in the screen below:

After that go to the next item and then set your environment settings as shown below:

Now we need to connect to the TFS server. In order to do this click on Tools > Options > Connect to Team Foundation Server. This should bring up the dialog box shown below. Just enter your server name in the dialog box without the port number by clicking on the Servers button. By default TFS runs on port number 8080 but you don't need to enter that in the dialog box. The dialog box is smart enough to automatically add the default port for you. Once you have entered the server name then you should be able to use Team Explorer.

Now that you are connected to TFS, you should bring up Team Explorer by clicking View > Team Explorer. Also look at the Source Control Explorer window by clicking View > Other Windows > Source Control Explorer. The pending changes is another good window to look at which is also available through View > Other Windows > Pending Changes

Now we are ready to create a local folder on our computer at C:\Workspaces so that we can map our local folder to TFS Source Control. Just create this folder if you haven't already done so and create a team project in TFS server if you don't have one. Just give the team project the name Test. Create a folder called C:\Workspaces\Test on your computer and map it to TFS. You can do this by bringing up the source control explorer window and clicking on the Workspaces dropdown. By default, Visual Studio will give you a workspace with the name of your computer. I would just add your new folder in there by clicking the edit button.

Once you have your workspaces mapped. You are ready to begin using TFS Source Control.