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Windows 8 store applications need to be built on a TFS build agent running in interactive mode if you wish to run any tests. So whilst rebuilding all our build systems I decided to try to have all the agents running interactive. As we tend to run one agent per VM this was not going to be a major issue I thought. However, whilst testing we found that any of our builds that use the Typemock build activities failed when the build agent was running interactive, but work perfectly when it was running as a service. The error was ...

I have been trying to script the installation of all the tools and SDKs we need on our TFS Build Agent VMs. This included BizTalk. A quick check on MSDN showed the setup command line parameter I need to install the build components was /ADDLOCAL ProjectBuildComponent So I ran this via my VMs setup PowerShell script, all appeared OK, but when I tried a build I got the error C:Program Files (x86)MSBuildMicrosoftBizTalkBizTalkCommon.targets (189): The "AddBizTalkHiddenReferences" task failed unexpectedly. System.ArgumentNullException: Value cannot be null. Parameter name: path1 at System.IO.Path.Combine(String path1, String path2) at Microsoft.VisualStudio.BizTalkProject.Base.HiddenReferencesHelper.InitializeHiddenReferences() at Microsoft.VisualStudio.BizTalkProject.Base.HiddenReferencesHelper.get\_HiddenReferences() at Microsoft.VisualStudio.BizTalkProject.Base.HiddenReferencesHelper.GetHiddenReferencesNotAdded(IList\`1 projectReferences) at Microsoft.VisualStudio.BizTalkProject.BuildTasks.AddBizTalkHiddenReferences.Execute() at Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.TaskExecutionHost.Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.ITaskExecutionHost.Execute() at Microsoft.Build.BackEnd.TaskBuilder.<ExecuteInstantiatedTask>d\_\_20.MoveNext() The strange thing is, if I run the BizTalk installer via the UI and select just the ‘Project Build Components’ my build did not give this error. ...

Had an interesting issue during and upgrade from TFS 2012 to 2013.2 today. The upgrade of the files proceeded as expect and the wizard ran. It picked up the correct Data Tier, found the tfs_configuration Db and I was able to fill in the service account details. However, when I got to the reporting section it found the report server URLs, but when it tried to find the tfs_warehouse DB it seemed to lock up, though the test of the SQL instance on the same page worked OK. ...

Having installed my TFS Alert DSL today onto a client’s TFS 2013.2, I have realised some of the documentation was a little unclear. So I have have just updated the download page to provide an easy means to get The actual DSL implementation (without rebuilding the source) A command line tool to create an event source in case you want log to the Windows event log Hope this helps

The problem Today I found I had a problem when trying to associate a Release Management 2013.2 release pipeline with a TFS build. When I tried to select a team project the drop down for the release properties was empty. The strange thing was this installation of Release Management has been working OK last week. What had changed? I suspected an issue connecting to TFS, so in the Release Management Client’s ‘Managing TFS’ tab I tried to verify the active TFS server linked to the Release Management. As soon as I tried this I got the following error that the TFS server was not available. ...

I have just submitted a session for DDDNorth 2014, which is at the University of Leeds on Saturday 18 October. There is still time for you to submit yours Session submission

Rik recently posted about the work we have done to automatically provision TFS build agent VMs. This has come out of us having about 10 build agents on our TFS server all doing different jobs, with different SDKs etc. When we needed to increase capacity for a given build type we had a problems, could another agent run the build? what exactly was on the agent anyway? An audit of the boxes made for horrible reading, there were very inconsistent. ...

I am currently rebuilding our TFS build infrastructure, we have too many build agents that are just too different, they don’t need to be. So I am looking at a standard set of features on a build agent and the ability to auto provision new instances to make scaling easier. More on this in a future post… Anyway whilst testing a new agent I had a problem. A build that had worked on a previous test agent failed with the error ...

Whilst working on an automated build where I needed to target a specific project I hit a problem. I would normally expect the MSBuild argument to be /t:MyProject:Build Where I want to build the project Myproject in my solution and perform the Build target (which is probably the default anyway). However, my project was in a solution folder. The documentation says the you should be able to use for form ...

If you are doing any work with Azure Cloud Applications there is a very good chance you will want your automated build process to produce the .CSPKG deployment file, you might even want it to do the deployment too. On our TFS build system, it turns out this is not a straight forward as you might hope. The problem is that the MSbuild publish target that creates the files creates them in the $(build agent working folder)sourcemyprojectbindebug folder. Unlike the output of the build target which puts them in the $(build agent working folder)binaries folder which gets copied to the build drops location. Hence though the files are created they are not accessible with the rest of the built items to the team. ...