Get rid of that that zombie build

Whilst upgrading a TFS 2010 server to 2012 I had a problem that a build was showing in the queue as active after the upgrade. This build was queued in January, 10 months ago, so should have finished a long long time ago. This build had the effect that it blocked any newly queued builds, but the old build did not appear to be running on any agent – a zombie build.

I tried to stop it, delete it, everything I could think of, all to no effect. It would not go away.

In the end I had to use the brute force solution to delete the rows in the TPC’s SQL DB for the build. I did this in both the tbl_BuildQueue (use the QueueID) and tbl_Build (use the buildID) tables.