Jason Prickett's Blog

There have been a lot of problems with compatibility of custom builds when upgrading from TFS2010 to TFS2012. This blog post is my attempt to summarize what you have to do and how to fix some issues you might run into. The very first step is to...

If you haven’t run into this problem in TFS Build 2012 yet, you probably will… Problem: After Upgrading your Visual Studio client or your build machine from 2010 to 2012, you start seeing errors like these… Opening a XAML...

If you have custom build tasks or activities that rely on “build.RequestedFor” (or “build.RequestedBy”) being the account name, you may have some problems when converting those customizations over to TFS 2012 Build. In TFS 2012, we have completely switched...

So, I did a few posts when TFS 2010 released on how developers could customize the Visual Studio Build Details View. However, it required creating a VS Add-In or Package and then deploying that to all your clients. Well, with the RC release of TFS 11...

Okay, so if you are a TFS Build user, you probably are familiar with this scenario… You setup a new build definition and get it working. It works for days maybe weeks, then suddenly builds start failing sporadically for no apparent reason. You have several...

In TFS 2010, we added Gated builds. A gated build is like a pessimistic continuous integration (CI). CI builds are started after every check-in to make sure the developer didn’t break anything. Gated builds require the developer to check-in through the...

In case you aren’t familiar with NuGet, check out this link: http://www.nuget.org How does NuGet help you with your build automation? In short, NuGet allows you not to have to check-in all those binaries that you depend on to build and deploy your application...

We noticed several early adopters running into an issue with the build service in TFS11 Beta stopping unexpectedly. There is no event log entry other than it stopped and restarting it seems to work fine. The root cause seems to be connectivity to the...

A picture is worth a thousand words… We will skip talking about the toolbar and the page title area, since I mentioned those in my last post. The Builds page has 3 sections: My Builds My Favorite Build Definitions All Build Definitions It is also bound...

When you connect to TFS from a Dev11 client, you will see a whole new Team Explorer. Here’s what you’ll see (I am already connected to a team project)… I won’t go into all the new features of Team Explorer, but I will tell you why it is so different....

Well, we finally got TFS11 to the point that we want everyone to see it! And just to encourage everyone to download it and give it a whirl, my next few posts will show you just some of the new Build features that you can find in this new version. Here...

I just helped someone today with this common problem... "How do I get my custom list process parameter to show something besides '(Collection)' in the Process Parameter property grid?" The answer is really simple if you are familiar with the WinForms...

Someone asked a question about how to do something in MSBuild the other day. They were using the UpgradeTemplate.xaml, so there build process was done almost entirely in MSBuild. What they wanted to do was fairly simple to do in a Task, but they didn...

This post is for those that are pretty familiar with the TFS Build features in Visual Studio. If you aren't, this may not make any sense. So, it's Friday and you just made a gated check-in, but you can't leave until your build finishes. So, you open...

If you use the TFS Build Automation Object Model, then you may have noticed that we have objects that are related to Controllers and Agents, but that don't show up in the UI. These objects are called Build Service Host objects or IBuildServiceHost objects...

Okay, so I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago and exposed two of the menu guids for Build. Since then I have been asked for others, so here they all are... Menu Guid (we use the same guid for all build menus): {34586048-8400-472e-BBBF-3AE30AF8046E...

In this post, I just want to help those of you out there that have upgraded from 2008 and need to bulk update all of your definitions. In this particular example, I will be updating the retention policies to remove the deletion of the label with the deletion...

So, I have gotten this question a couple of times... "How can I add my own custom menu item to a TFS Build Automation context menu?" Yes, this is possible and not really that difficult. We even added some extensibility in 2010 to make this an even better...

So, there are several things I want to talk about, but they all boil down to the perf of the Log View in the Build Details window in Visual Studio. Unfortunately, if you have a large amount of data here, it slows down everything until it gets fully loaded...

So, I have been asked this very question a couple of times now which means it should be searchable for all :). In TFS Build 2008, all of the logic for building on the server was tucked away in a targets file for MSBuild. All Team Build did was to call...

So, I have been asked this question a couple of times now and so I decided to put it out there for everyone. If you are creating custom build templates that do a lot of looping or other work that seems to make the build log way too noisy, you may want...

So, I had someone ask this question about the process parameters on the Process tab of the Build Definition Editor - “How can I get the Advanced category above the Basic category?” I decided it would be better to share this with everyone, since it isn...

In some previous posts ( here and here ), I talked about ways to change the log view part of the build details view. This time I want to discuss how to change the Summary view. It is a little more difficult, but the extensibility is there for you to change...

I had a request recently on how to “Secure” a build from code. While I am still not sure there is a great way to do that. What I found is that there is next to no information on the TFS Security API. So, I thought I would post this code here...

If you haven’t noticed already in 2010. New build definitions no longer use the tfsBuild.proj file or the Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets file. With the switch to Windows Workflow as the base technology that the build process runs on we no longer...