One of the changes we made in TFS 2012 for Update 2 was to support TFS 2010 build agents and controllers. This provides several major benefits. The first is the obvious one of not having to upgrade your build agents and controllers when you upgrade your server to 2012. The second is that you don’t have...

Brian wrote a post today about the version control web experience changes that were in today’s update. Today’s update also included Azure SDK 1.8 on the build VMs. I’ve seen quite a few folks asking for it, of course. One of the questions we get often is why we don’t have X in the build VMs. Some of...

Brian mentioned this in a blog post last week, but I think it may have gotten lost in everything else that was going on. The Team Foundation Service’s build feature (i.e., build in the cloud) has the Windows Phone SDK installed on it now so that you can build you Windows Phone 8 (and 7) apps. The blocker...

Jason Prickett has written a blog post summarizing issues and workarounds for problems encountered with TFS build when upgrading from TFS 2010 to TFS 2012. Upgrading your build definitions from TFS2010 to TFS2012 Follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/tfsbuck

Duat , a developer on Team Foundation Build, has written a blog post on how to resolve post-upgrade issues with your build workflow if your 2010 build workflow uses custom workflow activities that use the TFS client object model. Your custom assemblies need update, or else, redirecting Loading your custom...

Richard Hundhausen pointed out this blog post recently, and I thought I’d mention it here.  Rob Maher walks through the process of setting up a build definition to run only the tests that involve the code that was changed. TFS 2010 Build - Only run impacted tests If your tests take a long time to...

As part of our builds, quite a few projects copy files to the binaries directory or other locations.  These can be anything from image files to test scripts.  To have our builds complete more quickly, we use the multi-process option ( /maxcpucount ) of msbuild to build projects in parallel...

Today the .NET team is releasing a cumulative update patch. This has all of the QFEs up until a couple of months ago rolled into one patch. Included as part of that is a patch for WPF that improves the performance of the Windows Workflow Designer as well as a hang that a number of folks have hit. I had...

Ewald Hofman , an ALM MVP, has written a great series of blog posts on Team Build in Team Foundation Server 2010. The 2010 release introduces Windows Workflow as the overall orchestrator of the build process. Ewald walks you through quite a few topics related to this and the other new features. Check...

Have you ever tried to debug an issue in old binaries and you don’t remember which version of the source they correspond to?  Have you debugged without symbols because no one saved them?  Here’s how to make your life easier. One of the great features in Team Foundation Server 2010 Build is...

Andrew Hall wrote a great post on the Code Analysis Team Blog about how to use the code analysis checkin policy with gated checkin in Team Foundation 2010 Build to reject checkins that have code analysis warnings or errors.  He shows you how to configure the rule set and set up the gated build definition...

Unfortunately, we introduced a regression into Visual Studio 2010 SP1 in the process of fixing a performance issue in the build details view that a number of customers had reported (viewing the log was really slow for larger builds). We made this change late in SP1. I apologize for the inconvenience...

If you are responsible for work with your team’s build system, you will definitely want to buy a copy of Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build (Second Edition).  Both of the authors now work for Microsoft.  William Bartholomew is part of the central engineering...

Vishal Joshi, lead program manager for web platform tools, has a great blog covering using various project types with Team Foundation Build.  Here’s a selection of his posts on using team build , which I highly recommend if you are working with web projects. Team Build + Web Deployment + Web Deploy...

[UPDATE 3/24/12] You can find a real code metrics activity here as part of the Community TFS Build Extensions . Cameron Skinner has announced a new command line tool for generating code metrics . We’ve long gotten requests to be able to generate code metrics from the build. Prior to this tool...

Dan Moseley, dev lead for msbuild, wrote a debugger for msbuild while on leave(!) back during the 2010 cycle.  While it ultimately couldn’t be fully completed and tested to be an official feature, it is in the product with a switch to enable it (it’s off by default).  This was a conscious decision...

Patrick Carnahan is a developer on TFS Build, and he’s written a series of detailed posts on how to write custom activities in Windows Workflow 4.0 (WF), which is now used to orchestrate the build process for TFS Build in 2010.  It’s a deep dive on WF activities.  Jim Lamb’s post on how to...

William Bartholomew , former VSTS MVP and author of the book Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build , recently joined Microsoft.  He's written a great post on the handful of steps you need to follow if you want to build .NET 4.0 applications with TFS 2008: ...

Dennis Stone , a tester on Team Test, has posted a great walkthrough of using the new test impact feature of 2010.  If you aren't familiar with test impact, it's a feature that tells you which tests execute the code you've changed in a checkin.  Rather than run all of the tests, you can run...

The folks at Attrice have released a new version of their MSBuild Sidekick , and it now includes a visual debugger for msbuild.  If you've ever tried to debug a build process, you know how tedious it can be and will want to check this out. MSBuild Sidekick v 2.3 is released We are happy to announce...

There is now a book dedicated to MSBuild and Team Foundation Build.  The book is written by Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi and William Bartholomew .  Sayed has written about MSBuild before, both in books and MSDN Magazine articles, and William is a Team System MVP with a lot of experience in customizing...

Quite a few folks have reported longer build times and noticed that the build details view has a lot more output in it, and as a result of the extra output being logged, the builds are slower.  Aaron has written a post about a hotfix to speed up your builds in the SP1 version of Team Build. ...

Unfortunately there are several types of projects that do not work natively with MSBuild. Jim Lamb , program manager for Team Build, has put together a few posts with pointers on how to get these to work with Team Build. Project System Compatibility with Team Build SQL Server Integration Services...

In the past I've written posts on tools for TFS on CodePlex . I'm happy to say that there are now too many to show in a post. I'd encourage you to take a look using this query for TFS on CodePlex . A couple of people have sent me email about new tools for TFS on CodePlex, and I thought I'd mention...

We've heard from a few customers that they would prefer not to have the build labels deleted when builds are deleted. In Team Foundation Server 2008 SP1 we added a feature to control whether build labels are deleted when the build is deleted. This feature is really a stop-gap measure, and it changes...