I am trying build automation for a project developed using legacy language called Team Developer 6. where each file needs to be compiled as an exe. also need to do some filter activity before building exes. there are 300 exes.
this process I could do in simple .Net utility which does the filtering and invokes Team Developer compiler for required files.
Is it possible to put this in to TFS build work flow? what is the best approach for this?
Write an MSBuild project that invokes the necessary commands for the tooling you require and check it in. In the TFS build definition, make use of the default template (at first) and set the MSBuild project file you created as the 'project to build'.
This way you can test your build process locally with MSBuild on the command line, and determine which command line switches you might need. You can set command line switches into the build definition, or if you need some further control you can modify the default template to inject the command line switches directly into the MSBuild activity.
I recommend this way, as then you won't have to create any customized workflow, and can avoid having to go down the road of using custom workflow activities in TFS (which is absolutely supported, but in my opinion a bit difficult to diagnose/debug/maintain/upgrade).
You would ideally want to use an InvokeProcess activity to call an executable which does the filtering and invoking. An alternative but more complex approach would be to create a custom activity, but that requires installation of binaries on the build servers.
Related
We use Delphi 10 Seattle. Inside our code we use different compiler directives to produce different exe files, like debug, release version, or versions with different features sets (disable some functions for different customers ...)
Current way of getting the exe files:
change compile options by hand manually typing inside DELPHI IDE ...
compile and copy *.exe to a new location by hand
Any way to get this with one button click (faster approach ...)
Create a build configuration for each of your different feature sets.
Documentation for build configurations is here: Build Configurations Overview. This is the mechanism that the IDE provides for switching between debug and release builds, and there is no reason at all for you not to use the same mechanism to switch between your own configuration sets.
The option set feature allows you to extract certain sets or groups of options into separate files which can then be applied to configurations. You can apply the same option set multiple times, for instance once on top of a base release configuration, and then again on top of a base debug configuration. The build configuration functionality supports inheritance which makes it possible, with a bit of up-front design, to develop a clean hierarchy of configurations.
This configuration functionality is built on top of msbuild which means that you can use the same configurations in your command line builds. In fact, the fact that you mention changing configurations manually in the IDE is a concern. Building your product is not something that should require manual intervention. It is critically important that you address this and arrange that your build process is automated. You can use tools for this, although it is very easy to write your own simple tools that will invoke msbuild for all the configurations that you need to build. Please don't use the IDE to build for release.
As an aside, build configuration is one area of the product where the functionality of RAD Studio surpasses that offered by Visual Studio, in my view.
I am working with Visual Studio 2012 .NET 4.5 ASP.NET MVC 4 project that uses TFS for source control and TFS Build for continuous integration (CI).
I want to create functionality that on each check in the build number gets updated prior to the CI build is kicked off.
From research it seems that a custom activity can be created and integrated in TFS 2010 build template.
I have also seen examples of this can be achieved with MSBuild task.
I haven't done work in this area before, so I am wondering which is the better approach or the recommended approach based upon the options open to me? In general when would I use MSBuild tasks as oppose to custom activity? For example, I will be looking to run FxCop and StyleCop against check ins also in the future, so I would like a common approach to this.
In the case of incrementing the build number, I'd vote for the TFS Build Activity so that the implementation is not tied to your msbuild implementation. This allows you to easily apply the TFS workflow activity to any number of branches without tying it to the branches directly. In addition, it keeps your MSBuild project files clean of the task so that it isn't mistakenly executed on developer machines.
Holistically, I'd say that you need to take a variety of factors into account when deciding between MSBuild and Workflow activities:
1 - Does MSBuild support the functionality out of the box (like Code Analysis/FxCop)?
2 - Does the build step need to run on developer boxes as well as servers (StyleCop/FxCop)?
3 - Does the build step need to interact with the TFS API or source control directly (checking out/in a version file for incrementing)?
4 - Are you going to change build job schedulers later to something free (for example, Jenkins)?
It's the combination of these things that determines the implementation of any given tool integration in my book. I'd implement FxCop, StyleCop and any other tool that should be run on a developer box build via MSBuild. I'd implement build steps such as version incrementing, bin-placing and CI deployment invocation (for example, deployment of a SharePoint webpart as a post-build step) via a Code Activity or some scriptware.
Our C# solution has a couple of folders that are populated via post-build events (i.e. they are initially empty).
The solution builds fine locally, however when using the TFS build agent, the folders don't show up in the published websites folder.
Any suggestions on how to force TFS to copy the folders over?
This is addressed here: publish empty directories to a web application in VS2010 web project
TFS does not execute the AfterBuild target of your proj file. I believe it will execute the AfterCompile target but this still might not do what you want.
I have used the approach of including dummy files which is simple enough even though its lame.
I've tried the approach of including a powershell script to do some post-publish tasks which works.
More recently I have adopted a convention of including a supplemental MSBuild file that ends in ".package.proj" and added an additional MSBuild execution activity to my Team Build Template that looks for it after the files are dropped to the drop location and then executes it. This provides a simple hook into the Team Build workflow without getting you deep into changing the workflow for a particular build. It's just a single additional activity wrapped in a conditional that looks for the file. If found, execute it.
You could also make a custom build template and use the Workflow activities to perform various cleanup tasks, but it's probably overkill and will increase maintenance on the build templates. Better to keep the customization simple if you can and have it function in a way that doesn't require "opt-out" configuration on builds that don't require the customization. Existing vanilla builds should continue to work as expected after the customization to the template.
I'm just getting started with the team build functionality and I'm finding the sheer amount of things required to do something pretty simple a bit overwhelming. My setup at the moment is a solution with a web app, an assembly app and a test app. The web app has a PublishProfile set up which publishes via the filesystem.
I have a TFS build definition set up which currently builds the entire solution nightly and drops it onto a network share as a backup of old builds. All I want to do now is have the PublishProfile I've already setup publish the web app for me. I'm sure this is really simple but I've been playing with MSBuild commands for a full day now with no luck. Help!
Unfortunately sharing of the Publish Profile is not supported or implemented in MSBuild. The logic to publish from the profile is contained in VS itself. Fortunately the profile doesn't contain much information so there are ways to achieve what you are looking for. Our targets do not specifically support the exact same steps as followed by the publish dialog, but to achieve the same result from team build you have two choices, I will outline both here.
When you setup your Team Build definition in order to deploy you need to pass in some values for the MSBuild Arguments for the build process. See image below where I have highlighted this.
Option 1:
Pass in the following arguments:
/p:DeployOnBuild=true;DeployTarget=PipelinePreDeployCopyAllFilesToOneFolder;PackageTempRootDir="\\sayedha-w500\BuildDrops\Publish";AutoParameterizationWebConfigConnectionStrings=false
Let me explain these parameters a bit, show you the result then explain the next option.
DeployOnBuild=true:This tells the project to execute the target(s) defined in the DeployTarget property.
DeployTarget=PipelinePreDeployCopyAllFilesToOneFolder: This specifies the DeployTarget target.
PackageTempRootDir="\\sayedha-w500\BuildDrops\Publish": This specifies the location where the package files will be written. This is the location where the files are written before they are packaged.
AutoParameterizationWebConfigConnectionStrings=false: This tells the Web Publishing Pipeline (WPP) to not parameterize the connection strings in the web.config file. If you do not specify this then your connection string values will be replaced with placeholders like $(ReplacableToken_dummyConStr-Web.config Connection String_0)
After you do this you can kick off a build then inside of the PackageTempRootDir location you will find a PackageTmp folder and this contains the content that you are looking for.
Option 2:
So for the previous option you probably noticed that it creates a folder named PackageTmp and if you do not want that then you can use the following options instead.
/p:DeployOnBuild=true;DeployTarget=PipelinePreDeployCopyAllFilesToOneFolder;_PackageTempDir="\\sayedha-w500\BuildDrops\Publish";AutoParameterizationWebConfigConnectionStrings=false
The difference here is that instead of PackageTempRootDir you would pass in _PackageTempDir. The reason why I don't suggest that to begin with is because MSBuild properties that start with _ signify that the property in essentially "internal" in the sense that in a future version it may mean something else or not exist at all. So use at your own risk.
Option 3
With all that said, you could just use the build to package your web. If you want to do this then use the following arguments.
/p:DeployOnBuild=true;DeployTarget=Package
When you do this in the drop folder for your build you will find the _PublishedWebsites folder as you normally would, then inside of that there will be a folder {ProjectName}_Package where {ProjectName} is the name of the project. This folder will contain the package, the .cmd file, the parameters file and a couple others. You can use these files to deploy your web.
I hope that wasn't information over load.
The ability to publish web sites, configure IIS and push schema changes for the DEV->QA->RELEASE cycle has required either custom configuration to imitate publish or custom code where IIS settings are involved.
As of Visual Studio 2013.2 Microsoft has added a third party product that manages deployment of web sites, configuration changes and database deployment with windows workflow and would be the recommended solution for automating deployment from TFS build.
More information can be found here:
http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/explore/release-management-vs.aspx
You can use the Publish/Deploy in Visual Studio 2010.
See http://www.ewaldhofman.nl/post/2010/04/12/Auto-deployment-of-my-web-application-with-Team-Build-2010-to-add-Interactive-Testing.aspx for more information
I am playing with TFS 2010, and am trying to setup a build process that will have some custom steps.
These include things like, stopping/starting IIS, search and replace files etc... across environments.
I have tried to look for examples online and have not found anything clear and meaningful on how to just run a script or something over the source files. Looking at the default build process template (DefaultTemplate.xml) I cant make much sense of it.
How do I go about doing this ?
For info on customising the TFS2010 workflow build templates have a look at Ewald Hoffman's series. Start with Part 1 (archived here).
I should also mention that since it looks like you're doing deployment then you may want to break deployment automation away from build automation.
This is almost exactly what I'd say for this question (Split build and deplyment stages, investigate TFSDeployer). One additional element is more generic - for deployment tasks you can't find an easy integrated tool you should create a custom deployment script. You can call any script by adding an "InvokeProcess" step in your Build workflow. TFSDeployer also has locations where you can insert custom PowerShell Scripts. (If you don't like PowerShell you can have PowerShell or "InvokeProcess" call a different script engine.)