Summary

In this chapter, we covered the use of Team Foundation Build to automate and manage simple to complex build processes within a team project. Team Foundation Build allows you to treat builds as an integral piece to the team project.

On the server, Team Foundation Build provides a database, build engine, and common web services interface for defining, executing, and analyzing software builds. This chapter presented the logical and physical architecture of the Team Foundation Build components and showed how they coexist within the larger Visual Studio Team System technical framework. By using loosely coupled tiers, Team Foundation Build enables you to scale out build environments by assigning Build server functionality to a shared server, a dedicated server, or even multiple servers in a farm configuration.

On the client, a series of windows integrated into Visual Studio allows team members in all roles to easily participate in the build process. In this chapter, we described how the Team Explorer is used to define new build types and run those builds from within the IDE. And finally, this chapter toured the capabilities of the Team Build Browser to monitor and analyze the results of builds.