I've a Solution structure as below :
Solution 1 (Solution1.sln)
Project 1
Project 2
Project 3
I created a Team Build definition working with Solution1.sln.
My problem is that compiled binaries are stored into a single flat output folder : BuildName\Release
But I want to keep my project structure :
BuildName\Project 1\Release
BuildName\Project 2\Release
BuildName\Project 3\Release
See Preserving Output Directory Structures in Orcas Team Build. It's pretty irritating that this is neccesary, and it's a per-project tweak, but it can be made to work.
The default for Team Build is as you've seen - binaries in one folder, web sites each in a folder structure of their own; one per configuration being built. If you're just getting started with TFS, I suggest you try to use the default. You're more familiar with separate folders, but almost everything you read about Team Build will use a single output folder.
Other than familiarity, is there a reason you want separate folders?
Related
We have installers referencing a wixlib file to get some common functionality. The wixlib is built in another solution then moved to a folder within that solution. When we try to build the installers with a TFS build, we get an error from light.exe:
light.exe: The system cannot find the file '..\..\..\Core\Common\assemblies\v1.0\Common.Wix.wixlib' with type 'Source'.
Our regular projects can reference \assembiles\v1.0, since we have some other common assemblies stored there. How do we get WiX to recognize this location during build?
You are referencing wixlib directly. So as far as I understand the TFS build process, it should be added to TFS project of your solution. TFS project shouldn't be dependent on the output of another non-dependent solution. It is at least bad practice. And in any case you can't guarantee this output would be generated before your project build on server.
As far as I remember, TFS build creates separate folder for each build and gets sources there. So your solutions are no longer on the same folder hierarchy level.
One more point in favor of explicitly copying wixlibs into your installer project: versioning - in this case any bugs made in the common library will not immediately break all projects that reference it. And you can gradually upgrade and test every project. Can you imagine auomatically downloading new version of any 3rd party dll on every build? Any change in that dll will immediately break your application even if changes are not critical to you.
Since the shared component and the active solution are in two separate projects in TFS, the workspace must be setup so that the relative paths for references remain intact. The easiest way to do this is to set your Build Agent Folder structure in Workspace in your TFS Build to have $(SourceDir) represent your root. However, don't change your Source Control Folder - that stays the same.
For example, say you have the following structure:
-TFS
|-SharedComponents
||-MyComponents
|-ProjectArea
||-MyProject
You would want to have the following two items in the build Workspace:
Source Control Folder Build Agent Folder
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
$/ProjectArea/MyProject $(SourceDir)\ProjectArea\MyProject
$/SharedComponents/MyComponents $(SourceDir)\SharedComponents\MyComponents
This mimics the structure in TFS in your build folder, thus allowing all relative paths to remain intact.
One more note about this configuration: Since you have the shared components in another location, you may want to create a solution folder in MyProject and add the components that you are using to it. This will ensure they get pulled automatically when anyone loads your project from TFS - they won't have to go back and pull down the share components folder separately after discovering a build error.
Using TFS 2010 I need to build a solution that depends on a couple of other solutions held in different team projects. I'm editing my build definition and I create a list of "Projects to Build'. When it comes to build the parent solution I get an error because it's unable to reference assemblies created by the other solutions. So I go back to edit build definition and add /p:ReferencePath="c:\builds\3\referencedproject\binaries\" to the "MSBuild Arguments" Build process parameters.
Problem is, I don't want to hard code the c:\build\3. I guess there may be a $() property I can use in its place - can anyone please advise?
The other problem I have is that the 'Main' project and the two other projects that it references live at the same level in the source code. As far as I can tell, I have to set the source control folder to be the level above this - which happens to be the root. This means that TFS Build does a get of all the projects on the root - which includes dozens of projects that are not required for my build. It's not a critical issue since it makes no attempt to compile these non-related projects but it does increase the time for the build cycle to complete. Is this only way to avoid this to "group" the projects that are required for my build into a different TFS source folder?
For the references issue there are a few options. The most common one taking an explicit dependency on a specific version by checking in the binary to TFS.
For example, if you have Team Project A that has a dependency on Team Project B, I would assume they are setup as separate projects because they evolve differently, probably have different teams working on them, and have different release cycles. The common approach to managing this dependency is to checkin B.dll into Team Project A (usually in a lib folder specifically for this purpose), then use a file reference from within Project A's solution/projects to the dll in the lib folder.
This approach lets the Project A team explicitly choose which version of B.dll they wish to depend on, and make an explicit decision to adopt newer versions of B.dll on their own timetable.
For the other question of how to have a build definition download only select source code paths, you can specify multiple lines in the Workspace mapping screen when setting up a build definition. For example you could have the following:
$\ProjectA -> $(SourceDir)\ProjectA
$\ProjectB -> $(SourceDir)\ProjectB
This would download Project A + B but not C.
I'll start with problem 2 as this should be easiest to solve.
You have 2 options both involve changing the workspace mapping of your Build Definition.
You don't have to map at the folder "above", you can map individual folders so if your source looks like this.
$/TP/SolutionA
$/TP/Folder1/SolutionB
$/TP/Folder1/SolutionC
$/TP/Folder2/SolutionD
and you only want to include SolutionA and SolutionC in your build, you could set the workspace up as follows.
This will get just the code you need and preserve the relative paths between them.
Another option is to use cloaking, you map the "Root" folder and then cloak any folders you want the build to ignore.
Both of these methods will restrict the amount of source being downloaded when the build runs, and also prevent "continuous" builds from starting when checkins occur in the folders that haven't been mapped / Cloaked.
Problem number 1.
As Dylan suggests, probably the best thing to do is to use Binary References between solutions. Especially solutions in seperate team projects.
Check out my answer to this question for a full description.
I am pretty new to TFS and Build configuration tasks so forgive me if this problem has a simple answer.
I have a team project that is sort of a common library(CL) that contains dlls and apis that I commonly use throughout my projects. All my other projects reference files directly from the mapped folder for the CL on my dev machine.
I am trying to set up a build definition for Project A(Build server is on a different machine). I want always ensure that the CL is the latest before each build so is it possible to have the build definition pull the latest files first? The only other alternative is to start including the CL in of every project directly.
I tried adding a working folder for the CL, but it does not seem to get the files before it attempts to build project A. And then after when I try to rebuild after the failure, I receive a error saying that the CL working folder "is already mapped in workspace".
Instead of mapping in the sources, why not build the common library, deploy it to a common location, and have all the projects that use it reference it at the common location?
In addition to simply making more sense (it should be common binary, not common source), this greatly improves Continuous Integration builds. If several builds map the same source into their workspace, then when the common source is changed, all of those CI builds will be kicked off.
The default configuration of the Team Build Number Format is:
$(BuildDefinitionName)_$(Date:yyyyMMdd)$(Rev:.r)
It drops all output to \\foo\bar\MyBuildDef_20111031.1 Great stuff so far!
The small problem is that it drops all binaries in that directory without a good indication of the dependencies of the binaries.
How can you modify this property, or otherwise, to have the solution's binaries dropped in their respective project directories?
In the case above, I had expected the MVC website (complete with its bin directory) to be dropped. Instead, we got that PLUS the extra drop of the binaries in the root.
In other words: TFS, please stop dropping all binaries in the root; it looks messy, and it's confusing on which files belong/associated with what.
How can this be achieved with Team Build 2010?
This blog post should help you out: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/willbar/archive/2011/02/05/splitting-team-build-outputs-into-folders.aspx
Essentially, you create a new 'Platform' for each project. Team Build will put each platform in a different directory by default, so you get a different directory for each of your projects.
Build configuration dialog:
Drop folder output:
Unfortunately I have not found a good way to do this yet, though it has been a while since I tried to find a better solution then what I settled on.
Current have solutions for each desktop application, and one with all the websites. I then followed the instructions here to make each solution output into a separate folder.
I've got a solution with Silverlight projects, a couple Web applications and some Windows service and their small Winforms test applications.
When I build it using TFS it puts all binary files in the Binaries folder. It also creates a _PublishedWebsites folder where it puts the web applications ready for deployment.
What I would like is for a few of the projects to have their ouput in a separate directory in the Binaries folder. I want the files that I would normally find in the bin\Release folder to be there.
I looked long and hard and could only find scarce documentation on how to achieve that and only for TFS 2008. There's a good article there link text and another entry for VS 2010 there link text. However, none of these work :-(
It seems that the build ignores the <OutputPath> property. I tried fiddling with the <AfterBuild> property but unfortunately if I use the $(OutDir) property I get ALL the files in the Binaries directory and not only the ones that just got compiled.
At the moment I'm setting up a separate build that only has the projects I'm interested in that get compiled but I would really like to have all the files needed for the release built all at once.
EDIT: I didn't make it clear enough but I'm using the latest version of TFS (TFS 2010 RTM). I set up <OutputPathDir> on the project level as explained in the links that I provided.
Cheers.
In your build definition (.proj) file, check that
<Project>
<PropertyGroup>
<CustomizableOutDir>true</CustomizableOutDir>
</PropertyGroup>
</Project>
Also, you may run into some problems if you're trying to compile what was once a "website" project type (created from File->New->Website->ASP.NET Webiste). They seem to override the output directory every time. We had to convert some of those to class libraries instead.