Professional Team Foundation Server

Chapter 3. Configuring Team Foundation Build

Build automation is an important process in the software development lifecycle. The ability to have your application automatically compiled for you on a regular schedule can be extremely empowering. Whether you are running your builds infrequently, nightly, or every time there is a code change, the status of a build can give a good indication of the overall health of the project.

NOTE

Team Foundation Build was primarily designed by the Microsoft India Development Center. The original codename for Team Foundation Build is BigBuild.

In a perfect world, you would have a set of machines completely devoted to doing your builds. Your build software would allow you to perform the following tasks quickly and easily:

• Clean the build machine to prepare it for the next build

• Move the latest source code from the repository to the build machine

• Compile the code

• Run tests against the compiled application

• Store the build results in an easily consumable format

However, you never do seem to live in the perfect world, do you? Finding one product that easily integrates into your environment and does all these things is usually impossible. Most of the time, you are kludging together different scripts to try to automate the process as best you can. Even then, you still can't get the integration you really want. Team Foundation Build server is here to change all of that.

NOTE

Your build is at the center of your development process. Think about it, if your build ...