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.
Related
I've been tasked with migrating a build from TFS to VSTS, I've used TFS from a developer point of view, however I've never created builds. Can anyone give me any advice where to start, good websites, tutorials, tools that might help, anything that might catch me out etc, basically my knowledge on this is very limited so anything would help. I've no doubt there must be somebody out there who can say we've done this, here is what we did...the new VSTS build will need to be a copy of the TFS build however some analysis needs to be done as the build process is old and certain parts may not be necessary. Thanks in advance!
Migrate New Vnext build definition from TFS to VSTS
If you want to template your builds or move them from TFS to VSTS, you could also use the REST API's to perform this. Details please refer this blog: HOW TO MOVE BUILD DEFINITIONS IN TFS TO OTHER PROJECTS USING THE REST API
Another example shown here. It shows how to get the JSON response of a build definition and again using the same reference to make a new one in the project you desire.
Migrate Old XAML to New Vnext build definition from TFS to VSTS
Unfortunately, there will not be any automated conversion processes. The new builds are based on a different architecture and run on a completely different system. And you can use both the new builds and agents alongside your XAML builds, controllers, and agents.
If you have heavily customized XAML builds and custom activities, you
can continue using those builds until you are ready to port your
business logic into scripts that can run in the new builds.
You should also take a look at these series of articles by jessehouwing devoted specifically to the case like yours.
About how to create a build, you could refer this tutorial from MSDN.
We have upgraded from TFS 2013 to TFS 2017, One feature we are trying to implement that we had in 2013 was the ability to have a custom build number. the previous method we had a file called BuildVersion.XML which during the first build step would read the major,minor, and revision and name the build with that build number + 1 on the revision. It would then change then checkout and update the revison number and check in the new version. I know that there are steps where people update the AssemblyInfo. The issue is that not all our code is .net apps. we also now have SSIS Packages, Cordova iOS/android apps, angular sites, aws Lambda functions with node.js which do not have the concept of AssemblyInfo. is there an easy way to implement this?
You can do exactly the same thing in Team Build in TFS 2017.
You can update the build number from any task by calling:
Write-Verbose -Verbose "##vso[build.updatebuildnumber]1.2.3.4"
Add a PowerShell task and add an inline script to read from your file and update the build number with the above.
You can then have additional scripts that use the build number any way you need to version your application.
You can see the full list of logging commands here
https://github.com/Microsoft/vso-agent-tasks/blob/master/docs/authoring/commands.md
You can use my VSTS TFVC tasks to interact with source control, though I do not recommend it. I built these tasks for clients of mine who were doing exactly what you are doing.
Instead of relying on a file in source control it would be a much better solution to pass the BuildNumber from the Build Definition along to the build, have one of your first steps update the files on disk with the correct version number then run your build.
If you manipulate files during the build and check them in you run the risk of inconsistent numbering when you scale up to multiple build agents, it's hard to use in combination with parallel builds and build variable multiplexing and it becomes notoriously hard to do Gated Checkins and Shelveset builds. Plus, it limits your options to move to Git in the future.
I've recently developed custom build runners (plugins) to TeamCity and Jenkins. The plugins enable the users to start automated load tests as part of the build process.
To give you some idea here's the Jenkins plugin page with a lot of description:
https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Apica+Loadtest+Plugin
Here are a couple of screenshots of the TeamCity plugin:
The setup GUI: https://i.imgsafe.org/5221a01.png
Build log: https://i.imgsafe.org/c93f7f9.png
Custom tab with load test summary: https://i.imgsafe.org/f5b6937.png
Setup validation example: https://i.imgsafe.org/52cc9a2.png
These Continuous Integration frameworks allow a high level of customisation for plugin development: the UI, the output, client and server code etc. can all be tailored.
I've received a question whether we can develop a similar build runner for MS Team Foundation Build Service. I've completely new to TFS, I've never used it for anything. I've read through a couple of tutorials on how to install and set up TFS but there seems to be very little material available regarding custom build runners. The closest I've got are the following pages:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb130146.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jimlamb/archive/2010/02/12/how-to-create-a-custom-workflow-activity-for-tfs-build-2010.aspx
However, they don't provide any example on GUI extensions, validation, customisation etc.
Therefore I'd like to get the opinion of experienced TFS users before we get any more serious with the framework:
is it possible to develop plugins for TFS build?
what are the limitations? E.g. can I build a custom GUI with custom client/server actions?
can I include custom pages, show graphs etc?
Any advice is welcome.
Thanks for your help,
Andras
When it comes to TFS Build, you first need to know that there are two build systems: XAML Build and a new, now default, build system.
XAML Builds are based on Windows Workflow Foundation. You can create custom activities and add these to a Build Definition Template. XAML Build only run on Windows and extending them is not very easy.
The new Build system is based on Node, runs cross-platform and is very easily extendable. Microsoft has open sourced all the tasks they have for TFS Build (see GitHub for the repository).
Targeting the new build system means that you support on-premises installations of TFS 2015 and the cloud hosted version of TFS: Visual Studio Team Services (see visualstudio.com for more info).
The easiest way to get started is by creating a new VSTS account (free!), adding some code and running a build. If you have that working, you can start exploring the existing build tasks and learn what's possible. You can then easily create your own task and start experimenting.
One thing that might be of interest to you is that TFS/VSTS already support load testing. You can run a very simple load test with a couple of mouse clicks or configure more complex Web Tests and use these in TFS in combination with Application Insights. I'm not sure if that's what your customers are looking for but it's worth checking out (see Cloud-based Load Testing for more information)
I'm starting to dive into TFS 2012 and I have a basic understanding of the tiers and how build servers, controllers and agents work and how different build scripts can have different configurations and projects.
However, one of the things I'm struggling with is a requirement for our source control solution that says that I need to be able to prove a particular changeset or shelfset produced a particular build. That is, given a particular binary, I can point to a release changeset that generated that binary. I should also be able to point to the test changeset that was merged into the release branch. The idea here is not just a separation of duty, but validating that because the release and test changesets are identical, no code was injected into a project by a code reviewer.
I've read one blog post that talks about "Binary promotions" -- would that concept be useful in my situation? I'm having a hard time finding how this binary promotion is set up in TFS.
Deployment
Out of the box TFS doesn't really support deployments, it can deploy to 1 location on build which often is a test server (think lab management). TFS 2012 has built in support for Azure deployments, but they still happen at the end of a build and the build artifacts cannot be automatically deployed to a new location.
You could modify the build template to allow to release to different locations, but that would still be a fresh build for every environment and not true binary promotions.
TFS does, however, have a concept of build quality and actually fires off events when this quality is changed. TFS Deployer is a 3rd party tool that hooks into the quality change event and can execute powershell scripts. This means with a simple change of a dropdown value you can automatically kickoff a script that releases to any environment you want. You can customize the build quality list (per team collection) to be a list of environments (dev, uat, staging, production etc) which the script then figures out where to release the specific build to.
VS2012 also has some nice improvements to web deploy which means deployment configurations are stored in source control with the project, which in theory means they'll be available in the drop folder for TFS Deployer to make use of.
I don't believe TFS keeps a history of build qualities, which means you can't really use the build quality history to maintain a list of what is deployed to which environment. You could fairly easily record this information as part of the deployment script though. Or at the very least add a custom summary node to the build with information about the release.
TFS2012 does have the ability to mark a build as deployed as part of the Azure deployment functionality, you mark tfs deployer builds as deployed using a script but it doesn't feel very useful.
Octopus Deploy is another project that's worth checking out, and could be used instead of TFS Deployer if your build template creates NuGet packages. It requires a bit more control over the production hardware as you need to install agents on each environment to handle releases, but it solves a lot of other issues with deployment.
Versioning
Once you have a nice consistent way of automatically releasing that people don't bypass, you can look at enhancing the build template to inject the build version, or changeset number as the assembly version for anything built as part of that automated build. There's a number of different ways to do it and plenty of blog posts and tools to help you achieve that.
Alternatively you could just use automatic assembly versioning ([assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.*")]) to give you the date/time the build occurred, which ends up like 1.0.1234.123 where 1234 is something like the days since jan 1st 2000, and 123 is the minutes since midnight (my specifics may be wrong here).
If you're deploying websites, then I highly recommend injecting the current build version into the html somewhere. This way you can check what version a website is running without needing access to the bin directory. It can also be appended as a querystring to css/js file imports to ensure no browser caching occurs between versions.
Thoughts
Personally I'm hoping Microsoft realise that the xaml build workflows are trying to do too much and that they split the different concerns (build, test, deployment...) into different scriptable parts. Of course that would not be until the next major release of TFS which is years away. Although with Team Foundation Service they are trying to iterate a lot quicker, so they may actually extend the Azure deployment stuff into something more useful in the nearer future.
I am preparing to move my team's source control from VSS over to TFS 2008.
This is for an asp.net website, and I am currently using a combination of nant scripts and Cruise Control to do all of the builds and deployments.
I've been trying to wrap my head around the best way to architect TFS build to do the same thing I'm doing with NANT and Cruise Control, but I can't determine the best approach.
Here are my requirements:
When code reaches a certain point, I manually apply a label to it.
This labeled code needs to be built and deployed to any of our 25 different Dev, QA, or production environments.
Any of these 25 environments can be on any current or past labeled version of the application.
I need to be able to deploy any labeled version of the application to any of the environments.
I'm currently accomplishing the above using NANT to perform the build, and using Cruise Control to just pass in command line options for which environment(s) to build and deploy. I have a Nant config file with a list of all of my environments, and an associated label each environment should currently be using. This file gets manually updated whenever a new label is created.
I know the approach I'm using for NANT probably won't be the same as with Team Build, but has anyone done something similar with Team Build and could share how you accomplished it?
Labeling in TFS is much more robust than in VSS. When you create a label, you can create based on a changeset, date, workspace version, heck even a different label. (BTW, I was grabbing a link and came across this post that you might find relevant.)
By default, a Team Build will build from the latest version of code in source, but you can override the "CoreGet" target in a build to build a specific version. Aaron Hallberg (a.k.a. TFS's John Skeet) shows an example here.
see 4.
I haven't personally had this difficult of a requirement, but I've done something similar. When you queue the build, you can pass in any number of parameters in a couple important ways, 1) through the response file and 2) at queue time (simple example here). In either case, two parameters could be which environment and which label/version number. At my current project, I have continuous integration turned on, so when code in a workspace is checked in, the current code is automatically labeled, pull the specifics for my drop location from the response file, then deploy to the respective location.
Given the fact that you have ~25 environments and n number of versions/labels, you could build a simple GUI that reads the current labels through the TFS API and lets you pick which version to build to a particular environment.
To answer the question, the way I addressed this was to use a combination of a custom build task, cruise control, and msbuild.
The custom build task allowed me to get the latest version from a specific branch and label.
Cruise control allowed me to pass in specific information for a specific build to MSbuild, using a config file, but initiate the build from a UI.
msbuild was used like normal, however it was called from cruise control, and the custom build task did most of the work.