William Bartholomew

Our division’s primary Team Foundation Server is running TFS 2008 and as such we’re using Team Build 2008. This week I wanted to set up a Team Build 2008 definition to build a .NET 4.0 Silverlight application and this post explains how to do that. ...

In TFS Build 2008 you could generate custom build numbers by overriding the BuildNumberOverrideTarget and setting a property called BuildNumber. What does this look like in TFS Build 2010? The default build numbers are generated by the Update Build Number...

In the spirit of GrantH ’s and BHarry ’s posts outlining various dogfooding statistics it seems fitting to start my blog post series with some Team Foundation Build specific statistics. To put these numbers in perspective our first end-to...

One of the questions I received about my last post was: Why so many controllers? Which leads nicely into a description of the different pieces of hardware involved in our build process. All of our build infrastructure runs Windows Server 2008 R2 (x64...

Introduction While Team Build will serialize workflow variables into an AgentScope, if they are updated within the AgentScope the updated values will not be serialized back when the AgentScope completes. To achieve this you need to attach the data you...

My blog has been idle for some time because of two projects that have been keeping me very busy over the past few months. Firstly, I’ve been working on the second edition of Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build which...

Comparing XML is troublesome at the best of times but comparing Workflow Foundation XAML files is even harder because they contain both logic and designer markup. The designer markup stores information such as the expanded/collapsed state of each workflow...

Team Foundation Build 2010 allows each build process template to expose its own parameters to the build definition editor as well as to the person queuing the build. When using the API it can be confusing to see that these parameters are stored as a string...

One of the first things you’ll notice when you create a custom XAML workflow activity to use in Team Foundation Build is that all of the Team Foundation Build activities disappear from the toolbox. The reason for this is that when you’re editing a custom...

Anyone that has looked at the shipped build process templates in Team Foundation Build 2010 will agree that they are large and relatively complex. This is a good thing if you are wanting to use them out of the box or simply extend them because it means...

This is my obligatory hello world/introduction post. My name is William Bartholomew and I’ve recently joined Microsoft as an SDE (Software Development Engineer) in DDITDev . In this blog I’ll post interesting information about building software, design...

I was working on a small application today and it included a very thin wrapper around .NET Framework classes to make my code easier to test (i.e. providing interfaces and adapters for .NET Framework classes so I can mock them out). Because these wrappers...

One of Team Build’s behaviors that I often get questions about is it overriding the OutDir property and putting all of the build outputs in a single directory per platform and configuration. The typical reason that people want to split the Team Build...

In Team Build 2008 when you disabled updating work items as part of the build Team Build still listed the associated changesets and work items in the build detail. In Team Build 2010 you cannot turn off the updating of work items independently so setting...

Just over a year ago I posted some statistics about DevDiv’s Team Foundation Build implementation , the time has come to update those statistics. Over the last 12 months we’ve done an average of 11,000 builds per month (7,500 in our RTM environment and...

The VS/TFS 2010 SP1 Beta has been released! Brian has details on his blog but I wanted to draw attention to the Team Build fixes in this service pack, what’s great is that some of these fixes directly resulted from our dogfooding: Build Automation Cannot...

The TFS technical writers have been busy putting together documentation about the activities that ship with Team Foundation Build 2010 and this is now available: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg265783.aspx On this page you’ll find both a goal...

One of the properties you specify when creating a new build definition is the build’s drop location. However, this isn’t a statically defined drop location (because if it was each build would overwrite the previous build). Team Build 2008’s drop location...

Team Build 2008 provided an ItemGroup called AdditionalReferencePath where you could specify a list of directories that MSBuild would search for dependencies. This was typically used when you had a GAC reference that was not in the GAC of your build machine...

I’ve been doing some work with Hyper-V build controllers and build agents and rather than remoting to the Hyper-V host it’s easier to manage these directly from my Windows 7 workstation. This is possible but the set up process isn’t obvious so here you...

I was recently involved in tracking down a memory leak in a .NET Windows Service and I wanted to summarize the process we went through. This is really an aggregate of a number of other people’s posts that are referenced at the end of this post. Firstly...

I posted this on an internal DL today and I thought it was worth sharing… There are two important things about LOC: The only thing it is a measure of is the size of your codebase. Size isn’t necessarily a good thing. My personal opinion is that LOC is...

I’m regularly asked what’s the best way to upgrade an MSBuild-based build process to a Workflow Foundation-based build process and one of the most important parts of this is how to leverage the investment and dependence you have on any custom MBBuild...

I write a lot of console applications for everything from testing a snippet of .NET code to simple utilities to automate a process or solve a problem. Here are a couple of tips for writing console applications. Use Exit Codes Traditionally console applications...

After watching a Tech.Ed session by Juval Lowy and working with a variety of workflow-based applications (MSBuild build processes, Workflow Foundation build processes, etc.) I’ve come to realize that there is significant value to be gained by thinking...