Clik here to view.
Building .NET 4.0 Applications Using Team Build 2008
Our division’s primary Team Foundation Server is running TFS 2008 and as such we’re using Team Build 2008. This week I wanted to set up a Team Build 2008 definition to build a .NET 4.0 Silverlight...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Upgrade Paths for Custom MSBuild Tasks
I’m regularly asked what’s the best way to upgrade an MSBuild-based build process to a Workflow Foundation-based build process and one of the most important parts of this is how to leverage the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tips for Writing Console Applications
I write a lot of console applications for everything from testing a snippet of .NET code to simple utilities to automate a process or solve a problem. Here are a couple of tips for writing console...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Applications As Composition Of Services
After watching a Tech.Ed session by Juval Lowy and working with a variety of workflow-based applications (MSBuild build processes, Workflow Foundation build processes, etc.) I’ve come to realize that...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Excluding Code from Code Coverage Metrics
I was working on a small application today and it included a very thin wrapper around .NET Framework classes to make my code easier to test (i.e. providing interfaces and adapters for .NET Framework...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Customizing Team Build 2010’s Drop Location Algorithm
One of the properties you specify when creating a new build definition is the build’s drop location. However, this isn’t a statically defined drop location (because if it was each build would overwrite...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Where art thou AdditionalReferencePath?
Team Build 2008 provided an ItemGroup called AdditionalReferencePath where you could specify a list of directories that MSBuild would search for dependencies. This was typically used when you had a GAC...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Remotely Managing Hyper-V from Windows 7
I’ve been doing some work with Hyper-V build controllers and build agents and rather than remoting to the Hyper-V host it’s easier to manage these directly from my Windows 7 workstation. This is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tracking Down a .NET Windows Service Memory Leak
I was recently involved in tracking down a memory leak in a .NET Windows Service and I wanted to summarize the process we went through. This is really an aggregate of a number of other people’s posts...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Lines Of Code (LOC) As A Metric
I posted this on an internal DL today and I thought it was worth sharing… There are two important things about LOC: The only thing it is a measure of is the size of your codebase.Size isn’t necessarily...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Generating Custom Build Numbers in TFS Build 2010
In TFS Build 2008 you could generate custom build numbers by overriding the BuildNumberOverrideTarget and setting a property called BuildNumber. What does this look like in TFS Build 2010? The default...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What is the most minimal build process template possible?
Anyone that has looked at the shipped build process templates in Team Foundation Build 2010 will agree that they are large and relatively complex. This is a good thing if you are wanting to use them...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Make Comparing Build Process Templates Easier With XamlClean 1.0
Comparing XML is troublesome at the best of times but comparing Workflow Foundation XAML files is even harder because they contain both logic and designer markup. The designer markup stores information...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Naming Custom Workflow Activities
Just a quick blog post to make some recommendations about how to name custom workflow activities:Use VerbNoun instead of NounVerb (e.g. CheckAvailableDiskSpace not DiskSpaceCheck).Don’t suffix with...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Help! I’ve created a custom XAML workflow activity and now I don’t see the...
One of the first things you’ll notice when you create a custom XAML workflow activity to use in Team Foundation Build is that all of the Team Foundation Build activities disappear from the toolbox. The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Deserializing Process Parameters
Team Foundation Build 2010 allows each build process template to expose its own parameters to the build definition editor as well as to the person queuing the build. When using the API it can be...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Dogfooding Team Foundation Build in Developer Division
My blog has been idle for some time because of two projects that have been keeping me very busy over the past few months.Firstly, I’ve been working on the second edition of Inside the Microsoft Build...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Dogfooding Team Foundation Build: By The Numbers
In the spirit of GrantH’s and BHarry’s posts outlining various dogfooding statistics it seems fitting to start my blog post series with some Team Foundation Build specific statistics. To put these...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Dogfooding Team Foundation Build: Infrastructure
One of the questions I received about my last post was: Why so many controllers? Which leads nicely into a description of the different pieces of hardware involved in our build process.All of our build...
View ArticleClik here to view.
VS/TFS 2010 SP1 Beta
The VS/TFS 2010 SP1 Beta has been released! Brian has details on his blog but I wanted to draw attention to the Team Build fixes in this service pack, what’s great is that some of these fixes directly...
View Article
