Server 2008 R2, flying blind

I'm only flying blind due to a precedence set back when I was a wee laddie. You see, video and computer games, while they came with a manual, those were only to be read between the time you purchased the item and the eternity of a drive it took for a parent to get you home. In March, I pulled the trigger and bought an MSDN license. Since then, I haven't made the time to actually read about all the things I have in my possession, I've just been an installing fool. For $5000 bucks, I am trying my damnedest to get my money's worth. I'm typing this on a refurb'ed HP Pavilion I snagged from Microcenter. It seemed a shame to throw away a perfectly good Win 7 install but I needed to taste Windows Server 2008 R2. It's been interesting so far. If I've been gluttonous in installing software, this machine is paying the penalty for it. To Microsoft's credit, they have been warning me all along that I'm doing stupid things. I converted this machine to a Primary Domain Controller (PDC) so I could play with some AD things. And of course, I need SQL Server on here. Oh, but I shouldn't install that on the same box as the PDC. As much as I'd love to blog about all the things I've done to this poor machine, I wanted to capture here two links that were important.

The first is that Team Foundation Server does not run on a 64bit OS. 64bit is the way of the future, as I understand it, for MS products so flying blind, I selected the 64bit Enterprise Edition of Windows Server 2008 R2. That's a bit of a misstatement, I selected Enterprise ed, 64bit was the only option for W2k8. Doh! [Edit 2010-05-06]To clarify, TFS 2008 does not run on a 64bit OS. TFS 2010 does[/edit]

The other thing I wanted to point out, is that among the many ways you can configure the OS to provide some desktop functionality by adding the "Desktop Experience" feature. For some asinine reason, my install also required the ink and stylus to make the DE experience go. Time to reboot and then I can jam to soma.fm while I work with MVC2