Inside the Microsoft® Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build

Build Controllers

One limitation of Team Build 2008 is that when you queue a build you must select the particular build agent you want to queue it on, which means that developers need to browse through the available build agents to find the one with the shortest queue. This may not sound difficult or time consuming but if you have a lot of build agents or restrictions on which build definitions can be run on which build agents (for example, because certain software is installed only on some build agents) this can become more difficult.

Team Build 2010 solves this problem by introducing the concept of build controllers. When the developer queues a build they select a build controller rather than a specific build agent (as shown in Figure C-3) and ...