Chapter 23. Team Foundation Build

IN THIS CHAPTER

• An Overview of Team Foundation Build

• Creating a New Build

• Starting a Build

• Monitoring and Analyzing Builds

The last Visual Studio Team System tool we will cover in this book is Team Foundation Build (TFB). It is distributed as part of the Team Foundation Server and, like the other tools we have discussed, is an integrated part of the overall project experience offered by VSTS.

As projects march through their lifecycle, you reach a point at which it is time to pull together all the various components, compile them, distribute them, and test them. This overall process is known as a build. And as you will see, building software is much more than simply compiling source code into executable binaries. In fact, builds can be amazingly complex and can involve a huge amount of manual work by various members of the project team. This process presents some unique issues:

• The lack of a comprehensive, universal set of build tools that integrate with the project environment leads to unpredictable and unrepeatable ad hoc build processes.

• Monitoring the build process and gaining an understanding of the health of any given build can be difficult.

• Typically, no mechanisms are available to troubleshoot problems when they occur within a build.

Team Foundation Build is intended to automate many aspects of the build process and address the problems listed here by providing the entire project team with a holistic set of tools for creating and analyzing builds.

This chapter covers the capabilities of the Team Foundation Build tool. It overviews the basics of build systems, discusses how a typical build process is accommodated within Visual Studio Team System, and details the ways you can interact with the build tools from within Visual Studio.