Jason Prickett's Blog : VSTS 2010

TFS 2010 – What’s New On The Build Explorer?

Jason Prickett — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:39:47 GMT

The Queued Tab:

So, as you can see not much has changed on the Queued tab of the build explorer since VSTS 2008, but if you look close, there are a few changes.

1. There is a new filter you can apply - “Only show builds requested by me”. This filter will limit the results to only those builds you directly caused by checking in or manually queuing it. This is really helpful when there are lots of builds for your team project and you only care about yours.

2. There is a new column on the left. If you hover over it, you see it’s the “Reason” column. This shows you what caused the build to start. In the picture above, you can see two builds. The one with the icon was triggered by a checkin and the other was manually queued.

3. All columns except the image columns are sizeable. They start off adjusted to their data, but you can change that.

The Completed Tab:

Likewise on the Completed tab, not much has changed. In fact, it has the same changes as the Queued tab – a new filter, a new column, and sizeable columns. They work the same here as on the Queued tab.

TFS 2010 Beta1 – Build DEtails View Log View section

Jason Prickett — Mon, 18 May 2009 21:55:31 GMT

The picture above is of the Log View of the new Build Details View in Visual Studio Team System 2010. See my previous post on the Summary View for more information on the items above the words “Activity Log”. The log view can be seen by opening an in-progress build like the one shown above or by clicking the “View Log” link on a completed build.

Here are some things to notice about this view:

1. There are links (“Next Error” and “Next Warning”) to quickly jump to the first or next error or warning. The Log View can be quite long so this should help you find the errors more quickly. Of course, the error messages will also show up on the Summary view, so you may not need to come here at all.

2. The “Show Property Values” link will expand the log view even further and show you all the property values that were logged for the build activities. Because these values can greatly increase the size of the log, they are turned off by default.

3. On the right is a duration column. This shows you the duration of each build activity. If you are trying to speed up your builds, this information should help you determine what build activities are taking the longest. Note that the values roll up. So, parent duration values are approximately the sum of their children’s durations.

4. The data is presented in a hierarchy. This hierarchy maps perfectly to the build process template (more on that in a later post). This allows you to follow the path that the build took through the template and possibly correct problems with your custom templates. Note: showing the property values is important to understanding the flow.

5. The “play” icon in front of some of the lines indicates that those build activities are currently in progress. Another way to follow along as a build follows the process template logic. Note that a parent activity is considered in-progress if any of its children are in-progress.

6. Lastly, like the summary view, there is a slider in the bottom right corner that allows you to zoom in or out on the log view.

I hope this gives you some more insight into the 2010 release!

tFS 2010 Beta1 – Build Details View Summary section

Jason Prickett — Tue, 12 May 2009 23:23:16 GMT

The picture above is of the new “Build Report” in TFS 2010. I prefer the term Build Details View, because it is not actually a TFS report object. The view has completely changed, so let me take you on a quick tour:

1. The first thing you may notice is that this is a failed build. The icon in the upper left corner notifies you of the status (in progress, succeeded, partially succeeded, or failed).

2. The next thing on that same line is the build number “Build HW_20090512.3” and the status is repeated as a word. Then comes the Build Quality. That’s right you can change the build quality right here on the build details view.

3. The links on the next line allow you to view the summary page (that’s the page we see above), view the log page (need another post for that one), open the drop folder, and delete the build.

4. The bar graph - now things really start getting interesting. This is a graph of the last 9 builds for the same definition. The small triangle denotes this build. The height of the bars show the relative time that the build took and the color indicates the status. You can also hover over the bar to get a tool tip with that information. This graph is really helpful when the build is in progress, because you can see how long the other builds took and guess how much longer this one will be :)

5. The rest of the information beside the graph includes who started the build (jpricket), what definition was triggered (Build HW), what changeset was built, how long the build took, what build controller was used, and when it was started. A lot of info in a small space!

6. Latest Activity – this section includes who last modified the build and when. It also lists any work items that were opened during the build. Notice the link! Clicking on the link will open the work item :)

7. Summary – This section contains a lot of information. The main purpose is to report the results of the build. It is divided by Configurations with another section at the end for any Errors or Warnings that may have happened outside of a configuration. Each configuration has four sections: errors and warnings, projects/solutions compiled, test results, and code coverage results. Notice the links! You can go to the actual build log for the configuration, or you can click on a particular error and go straight to the source line. (this actually downloads the file and opens the exact version that the Build Machine was attempting to build).

8. Impacted Tests – this section is completely new and allows you to see which tests were impacted by the changes that were checked in.

9. If there were test results, you would also have a link to them, just like you did in TFS 2008.

10. Associated changesets and work items will also show up in their own sections for a successful build. They also have links to open the Changeset details or the Work Item.

11. Oh, and that slider in the bottom right hand corner allows you to zoom in or out.

Hopefully this encourages you to download the Beta and start playing with it!