Team Foundation Server continued...

Team Foundation Server:

As promised my research into Team Foundation Server has continued and here I am with some information (censored. I had to remove the part I prepared as part of my report to my Manager)

A Microsoft official at the VSLive! Conference said Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server represents a shift from a developer-centric focus in building software to a collaborative one. As much as I have read and explored about it, this seems to be correct.

Team Foundation Server works with the company’s Visual Studio 2005 Team System platform to enable collaboration between multiple roles -- such as project managers, architects and developers -- in the development process.
One of the things I was concerned about was the Team Foundation Internationalization.
The text below I got from Aldo Donetti Blog
Most of you know that Visual Studio is currently localized into 9 languages (English, Japanese, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, French, German, Spanish, Italian). Team Foundation will be localized in the same languages, but it has not been designed to be multilingual in its first release, therefore system administrators will have to select one language for the server.

In a distributed/multilingual organization it might not be uncommon to have users installing Visual Studio in their favourite language. Most of the User Interface is stored on the client, but not all of it. A number of error messages come from the server and will show up in the language of the Team Foundation Server installed. Or else, in case of server exceptions, the call stack is provided by the .NET Framework in whatever language it was installed on the server and this would be pushed to the client, though we always wrap exceptions in a user friendly way. It’s easy to understand why a fully localized experience will be achieved only if both the Team Foundation server language and the Visual Studio client language match.


Setting up your server to support international data

Most of the international issues you might have to deal with can be avoided by properly installing and configuring SQL Server on the Team Foundation server. Because some of these changes are hard to undo, you should plan the usage scenarios of your Team Foundation server in advance.

You should at least take into consideration the natural language your teams will be using and set the collation accordingly, because it will obviously affect sorting. Based on the language you plan to use, you might also want to appropriately set switches to allow Case, Accent, Kana and Width sensitiveness (see screenshots below). We highly recommend using a case insensitive collation. Also, should you wish to extensively use Extended Unicode characters (Surrogates), we recommend using one of the “_90” collations. Please see the SQL Reference manual to understand what option is best for you.