Mike's Blog

TFS Team Build support in Orcas

Who isn't interested in the new features of Orcas. I really am and especially all the features of TFS. Brian Harry posted a couple of months ago a great blog about all the new features. Since the latest CTP of Orcas you can check it out yourself.

In this blog I explain the new features of Team Build within Orcas.

• Improved ability to manage multiple build machines.
   
  
  
  
  
• Improved ability to specify what source, versions of source, etc to include in a build.
  
  
  
• Simplified ability to specify what tests get run as part of a build.
  
  Unfortunately I couldn't show you this feature because I couldn't create any unit tests with Orcas.
  
  
• The ability to story build definitions anywhere in the version control hierarchy.
   
  
  
• Support for retention policies. Specify how builds should be retained on the build server.
   
  
  
• Continuous Integration – There are many components to this, including build queuing and queue management, drop management (so that users can set policies for when builds should be automatically deleted), and build triggers that allows configuration of exactly how when CI builds should be triggered, for example – every checkin, rolling build (completion of one build starts the next), etc.
   
  
  
• Stop and delete builds from within VS.
   
  
  
• Support multi-threaded builds with the new MSBuild.
  
  
  
• Improved extensibility of the build targets – such as ability to easily execute targets before and after each solution/project is built.
  
  I couldn't find this option jet.
  

Summary
The team completely redesigned the Team Build to fulfill all changes requested by their customers. One of the nicest things is you can now reopen your build definition in the wizard instead as XML file. I personally think they did a great job. Keep up the good work guys.