TFS Build

Yesterday we pushed out a new release (August 2012) of the Community TFS Build Extension, including a new version of the Community TFS Build Manager (1.0.4.6) The two big new features in the Build Manager in this release are: Set Triggers It is now possible to select one or more build definitions and update the triggers for them in one simple operation: \ You’ll note that we have started collapsing the context menu a bit, the list of commands are getting long! 🙂 ...

I have posted before on how to implement dependency replication using TFS Build, once for TFS 2008 using MSBuild and then for TFS 2010 using Windows Workflow. The last post was not complete (I could not post all implementation details back then for various reasons), so I decided that I should post a new solution for this, but this time using the Community TFS Build Extensions library. If it is a good idea to store your dependencies in source control or not is a question that is well debated. I’m not going to argue pros and cons here, but for those of you that want to go this way here is a build process template that will get you started. ...

I finally got around to push out a version of the Community TFS Build Manager that is compatible with Visual Studio 2012 RC. Unfortunately I had to do this as a separate extension, it references different versions of the TFS assemblies and also some properties and methods that the 2010 version uses are now obsolete in the TFS 2012 API. To download it, just open the Extension Manager, select Online and search for TFS Build: ...

As many of you probably have noticed by now, Visual Studio Database Projects are not supported in the next version of Visual Studio (currently named Visual Studio 11 Beta). When you open a solution containing a VSDB project, VS11 wants to convert it to a SQL Server Developer Tools project instead. This project type ships with SQL Server and has a feature set that covers most of the functionality of the VSDB project, plus some new features, such a support for SQL 2012 and SQL Azure. A feature comparison list between the two project types can be found here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ssdt/archive/2011/11/21/sql-server-data-tools-ctp4-vs-vs2010-database-projects.aspx ...

We have been using TFS 2010 build for distributing a build in parallel on several agents, but where the actual compilation is done by a bunch of external tools and compilers, e.g. no MSBuild involved. We are using the ParallelTemplate.xaml template that Jim Lamb blogged about previously, which distributes each configuration to a different agent. We developed custom activities for running these external compilers and collecting the information and errors by reading standard out/error and pushing it back to the build log. ...

A year ago I blogged about how to manage your build process templates using the TFS API. The main reason for doing this is that you can (and should!) store your “golden” build process templates in a common location in your TFS project collection, and then add them to each team project that requires those templates. This way, you can fix a bug or add a new feature in one place and have the change affect all build definitions. ...

The InvokeProcess activity is very useful when it comes to running shell commands and external command line tools during a build process. When it comes to integrating with TFS source control during a build, the TF.exe command line tool can be your friend, as it lets you do most of the usual stuff such as check-in, checkout, add, modify workspaces etc. However, it can be a bit tricky to handle the output from tf.exe, since it often produces warnings that is not necessarily a problem for your build. This is not a problem related only to tf.exe, but to all applications that produces errors and warnings on the canonical error format. ...

The latest release of the Community TFS Build Extensions include a brand new tool called Community TFS Build Manager and has been created for two reasons: An implementation of the Team Foundation Build API which is referenced by the Rangers Build Customization Guidance V2 (available H1 2012) \ Provide a solution to a real problem. The Community TFS Build Manager is intended to ease the management of builds in medium to large Team Foundation Server environments, though it does provide a few features which all users may find useful. The first version of the tool has been implemented by myself and Mike Fourie. You can download the extension from the Visual Studio Gallery here: http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/16bafc63-0f20-4cc3-8b67-4e25d150102c ...

I often use the VS 2010/TFS 2010 evaluation virtual machines that Microsoft publishes every 6 months with the latest bits. It’s a great timesaver to use an image where everything is already setup and also contains a bit of sample data that is useful when you want to demo something for customers. There is one thing that has always been a, albeit small, but still very annoying problem and that is that the builds always partially fail when you start using the image. When you want to demo the powerful feature of associated work items in a build, you’ll find yourself with your pants down since the build fails when trying to update the associated work item! Even when looking at the historical builds for the Tailspin Toys project, you will notice that they also partially failed: ...

Anyone working with developing custom activities in TFS 2010 Build has run into the following dreadful error message when running the build: TF215097: An error occurred while initializing a build for build definition TeamProjectMyBuildDefinition: Cannot create unknown type ‘{clr-namespace:[namespace];assembly=[assembly]}Activity What the error means is that when the TFS build service loads the build process template XAML for the build definition, it can’t create an instance of the customer workflow activity that is referenced from it. ...