Eric Lee’s Orcas Team Build Screencasts

Buck Hodges

March 2nd, 20070 0

Eric Lee of Counterpunch Software (former Softie) has started posting about Orcas features in the March CTP.

First, he goes through a list of new features with some screenshots.

A Baker’s Dozen of New Features in Orcas

There is nothing like having a new version of Visual Studio to play around with 🙂 Not that Visual Studio 2005 is all that old, but the March CTP of Orcas was just released. I picked up the VPC version last night and gave it a whirl.

So far it looks great! I was expecting a very small upgrade to VS 2005, but there are some really substantial features here.

Here are a few features that caught my eye in no particular order.

Then he posted a couple of nice Orcas Team Build screencasts. Watch these to see the continuous integration and more in action. There short, and he keeps moving so you won’t get bored. It’s cool to watch it work for someone else, since no one outside of DevDiv had used it until the March CTP release.

Continuous Build!!

Hey guys,

One of the most frequent feature requests made to the Team Foundation Server development team is for continuous build.

Continuous build can take many forms, but the general idea is to automatically kick off a team-wide build when a developer makes a check-in. Some development teams like to gather up a few check-ins before kicking off the build.

The idea is to try and catch changes that break the build as soon as possible.

The exciting news is that with the Orcas release of Team Foundation Server, there is a feature in the build called Triggers. These triggers enable you to determine when a build should be kicked off. One such trigger will start a build with each checkin; so we finally have Continuous Build!

I made a quick, casual video about the feature, check it out if you get the chance.

Build Agents, Queuing and more…

Hey guys,

The Team Build development must have been working pretty hard since the last release. The March CTP has a really mature-feeling build of this feature.

It really looks like a lot of thought has been put into how to make Team Build easier to use and more powerful.

There are a number of things besides continuous build that is worth a look at – build agents are managed in a much better way, there is a build definition editor, builds are ‘queued’ rather than just started, and build results are much easier to work with.

I made a casual, grab-bag style video of these new features; check it out if you get the chance.