{"id":4121,"date":"2011-04-01T11:38:27","date_gmt":"2011-04-01T11:38:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/bharry\/2011\/04\/01\/build-folders\/"},"modified":"2024-06-14T13:36:03","modified_gmt":"2024-06-14T20:36:03","slug":"build-folders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/build-folders\/","title":{"rendered":"Build Folders"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the fairly common requests we get is for some way to organize build definitions.\u00a0 If you have more than a dozen or two build definitions in a single Team Project, the Team Explorer starts to get unwieldy.\u00a0 At our MVP Summit a couple of months ago, one of our MVPs presented a cool Team Explorer extension he had built for organizing build definitions.\u00a0 I was really impressed with how simple it was.<\/p>\n<p>Basically he just recognizes a naming convention for build definitions and presents them as folders.\u00a0 So, for instance, a build definition called Foo.Bar.Baz would be rendered as:<\/p>\n<p>Foo<\/p>\n<p>Bar<\/p>\n<p>Baz<\/p>\n<p>The \u201c.\u201d is a separator character (he made it configurable, of course).\u00a0 I just installed it and opened up our DevDiv dogfood server just to see what it would look like.\u00a0 It turns out, completely coincidentally, we had already been using \u201c.\u201d as a way to categorize our build definitions, so when I opened up Terje\u2019s extension, I automatically had some nice organization.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a screenshot of our Team Explorer window with a few folders expanded.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2011\/04\/5287.image_thumb_2603629D.png\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-16254\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2011\/04\/5287.image_thumb_2603629D.png\" alt=\"Image 5287 image thumb 2603629D\" width=\"222\" height=\"484\" srcset=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2011\/04\/5287.image_thumb_2603629D.png 222w, https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/8\/2011\/04\/5287.image_thumb_2603629D-138x300.png 138w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 222px) 100vw, 222px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>One nice thing about this tool is that not everyone has to use it.\u00a0 Because it just uses naming convention, people who don\u2019t have the tool installed just see build definitions with \u201c.\u201ds in the name and everything keeps working.\u00a0 It\u2019s a very cool tool and has been very stable in my limited use of it.\u00a0 I encourage you to check it out if you have lots of build definitions.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com\/35daa606-4917-43c4-98ab-38632d9dbd45\">http:\/\/visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com\/35daa606-4917-43c4-98ab-38632d9dbd45<\/a><\/p>\n<p>For our next major version, we are looking at Team Explorer improvements and among them will be improved ways to manage build definitions.\u00a0 Until this, this add-on looks like a great solution.<\/p>\n<p>Brian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the fairly common requests we get is for some way to organize build definitions.\u00a0 If you have more than a dozen or two build definitions in a single Team Project, the Team Explorer starts to get unwieldy.\u00a0 At our MVP Summit a couple of months ago, one of our MVPs presented a cool [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":244,"featured_media":14617,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-4121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-tfs"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>One of the fairly common requests we get is for some way to organize build definitions.\u00a0 If you have more than a dozen or two build definitions in a single Team Project, the Team Explorer starts to get unwieldy.\u00a0 At our MVP Summit a couple of months ago, one of our MVPs presented a cool [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/244"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4121\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}