TFS

UPDATE: 2010-09-15 – Added details about the use of the ExitCode variable One of the most common complaints from people starting to use Team Build is that is doesn’t support building Microsoft’s own Setup and Deployment project (*.vdproj). When creating a default build definition that compiles a solution containing a setup project, you’ll get the following warning: The project file “MyProject.vdproj” is not supported by MSBuild and cannot be built. ...

I still see people complaining about the long time it takes to load test results from a TFS build in Visual Studio. And they make a valid point, it does take a very long time to load the test results, even for a small number of tests. The reason for this is that the test results is not just the result of the test run but also all the binaries that were part of the test run. This often also means that the debug symbols (*.pdb) will be downloaded to your local machine. This reason for this behaviour is that it letsyou re-run the tests locally. ...

When upgrading from TFS 2008 to TFS 2010, all builds are “upgraded” in the sense that a build definition with the same name is created, and it uses the UpgradeTemplate build process template to execute the build. This template basically just runs MSBuild on the existing TFSBuild.proj file. The build definition contains a property called ConfigurationFolderPath that points to the TFSBuild.proj file. So, existing builds will run just fine after upgrade. But what if you want to use the new workflow functionality in TFS 2010 Build, but still have a lot of MSBuild scripts that maybe call custom MSBuild tasks that you don’t have the time to rewrite? Then one option is to keep these MSBuild scrips and call them from a TFS 2010 Build workflow. This can be done using the MSBuild workflow activity that is avaiable in the toolbox in the Team Foundation Build Activities section: ...

The default behaviour in TFS Team Build (all versions) is to create a bug work item when a build fails. This main benefit of this is that you get a work item for something that needs to be done, namely to fix the build!. When the developer responsible for the build failure has fixed the problem, he/she can associated that check-in with the work item that was created from the previous build failure. ...

*** UPDATE 2010-08-17 ** Several people have asked me for a complete sample application, so I have put this together and it is available here: http://cid-ee034c9f620cd58d.office.live.com/self.aspx/BlogSamples/CreateTFSBuildDefinition.zip In this post I will show how to create a new build definition in TFS 2010 using the TFS API. When creating a build definition manually, using Team Explorer, the necessary steps are lined out in the New Build Definition Wizard: So, lets see how the code looks like, using the same order. To start off, we need to connect to TFS and get a reference to the IBuildServer object: ...

When embracing Team Build 2010, you typically want to define several different build process templates for different scenarios. Common examples here are CI builds, QA builds and release builds. For example, in a contiuous build you often have no interest in publishing to the symbol store, you might or might not want to associate changesets and work items etc. The build server is often heavily occupied as it is, so you don’t want to have it doing more that necessary. Try to define a set of build process templates that are used across your company. In previous versions of TFS Team Build, there was no easy way to do this. But in TFS 2010 it is very easy so there is no excuse to not do it! :-) ...

In TFS Team Build (all versions), each build is associated with changesets and work items. To determine which changesets that should be associated with the current build, Team Build finds the label of the “Last Good Build” an then aggregates all changesets up unitl the label for the current build. Basically this means that if your build is failing, every changeset that is checked in will be accumulated in this list until the build is successful. ...

Yesterday I upgraded my dev laptop to VS 2010 RC. To upgrade to VS 2010 RC you need to first uninstall VS 2010 Beta 2 (which doesn’t really make it an upgrade does it? :-) I also hade an instance of TFS 2010 Beta 2 om my machine so I uninstalled that as well. The installation of VS 2010 went fine, and then I installed Team Explorer 2010 RC. However, when starting VS and switching to the team explorer, I got the following error: ...

We are in the process of upgrading the entire company to TFS 2010 Beta 2, and in preparing for that we have done some test upgrades to make sure that all things work as expected after the upgrade. As expected, most issues that turned up had to do with builds. This is one of the areas that has changed the most compared to TFS 2008. I thought that I would use this post to run through some of the issues that we found. ...

Disclaimer: This blog post discusses features in the TFS 2010 Beta 1 release. Some of these features might be changed in the RTM release. In TFS 2010, Microsoft has changed the build orchestration language in Team Build from MSBuild to Windows Workflow 4.0. Aaron Hallberg has written a post on how to implement a custom workflow activity using either the workflow designer or using a code activity that composes an activity. In this post, I will show how to implement a “pure” code activity, i.e. no workflow elements,and how to add this activity to a build process definition. Note, this is still Beta 1, and some things will definitely change when Beta2 and RTM arrives but this will get you started with customizing your builds in TFS 2010. ...