TFS and collation

Published on June 7, 2006

So I screwed up. I tried to upgrade my Beta 3 Refresh of TFS last night to the RTM version. All was going relatively well until it told me that I could not install TFS because my SQL Server had a default collation that was accent insensitive. I live in a bilingual province, accents happen sometimes, sometimes they don't. Montreal, Montréal, Quebec, Québec. Are they equivalent? You betcha. TFS apparently doesn't want to have to set the collation sequences explicitly on its database, it apparently wants you to set you server to conform. Shame they couldn't make this decision before Beta3! Oh well, I was pretty upset. That was until I found out how to turn off the check :-). A little file called hcpackage.xml has all the checks defined and available to comment out! So call me crazy, but I figure I should be safe as long as I don't create any files or folders with accents in them. At least until I get my new server and do a complete fresh install. Then I have to decide if I want to try and change the collation sequence on all of the tables and databases in my existing TFS server!