How to connect AX 2009 with Visual Studio Online (Visual Studio Team Services)

Question

I'm trying to connect my AX 2009 installation to VSO (recently renamed to VSTS).

After browsing some forum entries I know that I have to install the following:

• Install Visual Studio 2008 (not the Express Edition)
• Install Team Explorer 2008
• Install Visual Studio 2008 SP1 (This will upgrade both VS2008 and Team Explorer 2008 to SP1)
• Install VSTS 2008 Forward Compatibility Update

The installation order is important because the SP1 will update VS and Team Explorer, so I followed that order.

Then I created a project in Visual Studio Online.

Now I want to connect my AX 2009 with the repository in VSO. The VSO is hosting a TFS, so this should work.

---

As far as I could find out to configure the TFS settings you need to set the Version Control Parameters and the System Settings. I did both as shown in the following screenshots:

When I'm setting the Version Control Paramters the Internet Explorer opened and I needed to authenticate with my User and Password against VSO (so this seems fine to me).

The final step now would be to Create the Repository (Tools -> Developer Tools -> Version Control -> Create Repository. But when I try to do this I get the following error-log: Team Server connection error. [Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][DBNETLIB]SQL Server does not exist or access denied.

The settings in 7 could be wrong - I'm not really sure what values are to set there.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Install the following components:

• Visual Studio 2010 with SP1 (can be installed side by side with, or as a replacement for VS2008).
• Team Foundation Server 2010 SP1 Object Model
• KB 2662296
• KB 2736182

There's additional discussion around this on the Dynamics Community AX Forum.

Answer 2

The plugin is trying to access a SQL Server database. As VSTS is hosted on Azure and uses multi-tenanting there is no access to SQL server on that URL.

I am pretty sure that this is not ever going to work. VSTS is NOT just hosted TFS and even if it were, Visual Studio 2008 is no longer supported as a client for either TFS or VSTS.