Professional Team Foundation Server

3.3. Customizing and Extending Team Foundation Build

Team Foundation Build provides out-of-the-box capabilities for creating basic build types. But, what if you have special needs during the build—for example, you have to trigger a third-party testing tool during the build process? These scenarios are not uncommon—therefore it is important to understand how Team Foundation Build can be extended and customized. There are also some limitations that you should understand.

Team Foundation Build is built upon MSBuild, therefore most (if not all) of the limitations that apply to MSBuild also apply to Team Foundation Build. For example, Team Foundation Build is primarily designed for building .NET Framework 2.0 applications. If you want to build anything else, you have to customize the build process.

Team Foundation Build does not support deployment projects. (However, it does support the Web deployment project.) Out-of-the-box, you have no user interface to modify the build scripts

NOTE

Although there are no prebuilt tools to modify Team Foundation Build scripts, there are a few really interesting projects on the Web. The first is a Windows Presentation Foundation sample in the Windows SDK called GUI for MSBuild. You can download the sample at http://windowssdk.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms756489.aspx. There is also another free tool called the MSBuild Sidekick that you download at http://www.attrice.info/msbuild/.

In the current version of Team Foundation Build, you have to ...