PublishedApplications sweetness for TFS Build

Dries Marckmann — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 14:46:36 GMT

I just learned that there exists a nuget package that allows you to build your non-web projects to a '_PublishedApplications' directory just as your web projects are build to a '_PublishedWebsites' directory.

Check it out: http://www.nuget.org/packages/PublishedApplications/

From there on it's an easy ride to get your build to produce Octopus deploy packages. You can read about it here: http://help.octopusdeploy.com/discussions/problems/505-all-binaries-from-tfs-build-in-nuget-package

If you want to know all about setting up TFS build for Octopus deploy, check this great walkthrough: http://octopusdeploy.com/blog/automated-deployment-with-tfspreview-octopack-myget

Happy Coding!

Fixing a Branching Mess

Dries Marckmann — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 14:59:15 GMT

At work we never really had a branching strategy. This resulted in a big branching mess. People were either not branching at all or were making it up as they went along.

Now we have chosen to follow guidance given at http://tfsbranchingguideiii.codeplex.com/. The Basic Branch Plan should work fine for us in most cases. This plan dictates that our branch hierarchy should look like this:

However, our branch hierarchy looked more like 2 separate trees or just a single column like this:

That’s not good.

I came across the option to reparent a branch from: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/tfsversioncontrol/thread/70eb6d7d-ac81-4de0-a182-89993803b3de

However, when I tried this I saw that I could not select certain branches as a parent to other branches. The solution to this is the same as fixing branches after a migration. Do a baseless merge! This is nicely described in this post, step 2:

http://www.richard-banks.org/2010/09/how-to-fix-branches-after-migration-to.html

And look at our branch hierarchy now:

Dries Marckmann : TFS

PublishedApplications sweetness for TFS Build

Fixing a Branching Mess