Buck Hodges

Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS and Team Foundation Server)

Team Build - Buck Hodges

Team Foundation Server 2012 Update 2 supports 2010 Build Agents and Controllers

March 30, 2013 Mar 30, 2013 03/30/13
Buck Hodges
[UPDATE 9/26/13] TFS 2013 will include support for both TFS 2010 build agents and controllers and also TFS 2012 build agents and controllers. One of the changes we made in TFS 2012 for Update 2 was to support TFS 2010 build agents and controllers. This provides several major benefits. The first is the obvious one of not having to upgrade your...

Azure SDK 1.8 now available for build in Team Foundation Service

December 10, 2012 Dec 10, 2012 12/10/12
Buck Hodges
Brian wrote a post today about the version control web experience changes that were in today’s update. Today’s update also included Azure SDK 1.8 on the build VMs. I’ve seen quite a few folks asking for it, of course. One of the questions we get often is why we don’t have X in the build VMs. Some of Brian’s post ...

Windows Phone SDK now available in Build for Team Foundation Service

November 9, 2012 Nov 9, 2012 11/9/12
Buck Hodges
Brian mentioned this in a blog post last week, but I think it may have gotten lost in everything else that was going on. The Team Foundation Service’s build feature (i.e., build in the cloud) has the Windows Phone SDK installed on it now so that you can build you Windows Phone 8 (and 7) apps. The blocker here had been that the SDK could ...

TFS 11 Beta upgrade: Existing workflows that have custom workflow activities using the TFS client OM

March 19, 2012 Mar 19, 2012 03/19/12
Buck Hodges
Duat, a developer on Team Foundation Build, has written a blog post on how to resolve post-upgrade issues with your build workflow if your 2010 build workflow uses custom workflow activities that use the TFS client object model. Your custom assemblies need update, or else, redirecting Loading your custom assemblies in the TFS 11 build ...

Running only impacted tests in TFS 2010 Build

March 12, 2012 Mar 12, 2012 03/12/12
Buck Hodges
Richard Hundhausen pointed out this blog post recently, and I thought I’d mention it here.  Rob Maher walks through the process of setting up a build definition to run only the tests that involve the code that was changed. TFS 2010 Build - Only run impacted tests If your tests take a long time to run, you may wish to only run ...

A tool to find duplicate copies in a build

January 21, 2012 Jan 21, 2012 01/21/12
Buck Hodges
As part of our builds, quite a few projects copy files to the binaries directory or other locations.  These can be anything from image files to test scripts.  To have our builds complete more quickly, we use the multi-process option (/maxcpucount) of msbuild to build projects in parallel. This all sounds normal, so what’s the ...

Ewald’s posts on TFS Build 2010

May 31, 2011 May 31, 2011 05/31/11
Buck Hodges
Ewald Hofman, an ALM MVP, has written a great series of blog posts on Team Build in Team Foundation Server 2010.  The 2010 release introduces Windows Workflow as the overall orchestrator of the build process.  Ewald walks you through quite a few topics related to this and the other new features.  Check it out...