Team Build

Team Build

As discussed in Chapter 6, one of the most difficult tasks throughout this process is to get a good public “team build” because all source code in the team project must be built—including changes by the entire development team—on a separate build machine. Although this process is normally very tedious, Team Build provides a straightforward way to assist with this build process—a simple wizard that generates a build script.

This build script automates the entire out-of-the-box Team Build process, and it can be edited if the process needs to be further customized or extended. To fully support this crucial part of the application development process, Team Build integrates seamlessly with other Team System tools such as Team Foundation Version Control, Work Item Tracking, and various testing utilities available to developers and testers.

At the completion of the build process, a full report is generated with information about the build result as well as the general health of the build. This report shows relevant information about the state of the build, including the following items:

• The associated number of errors and warnings for each build configuration with log file links

• Test run and code coverage results

• A complete list of changesets that includes the build and who checked it in

• Work items associated with a build

The bottom line is that Team Build might very well become your new best friend because it can give you final, stable .MSI files that are ready to deploy.