Question

I am preparing to move my team’s source control from VSS over to TFS 2008.

This is for an asp.net website, and I am currently using a combination of nant scripts and Cruise Control to do all of the builds and deployments.

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the best way to architect TFS build to do the same thing I’m doing with NANT and Cruise Control, but I can’t determine the best approach.

Here are my requirements:

1. When code reaches a certain point, I manually apply a label to it.
2. This labeled code needs to be built and deployed to any of our 25 different Dev, QA, or production environments.
3. Any of these 25 environments can be on any current or past labeled version of the application.
4. I need to be able to deploy any labeled version of the application to any of the environments.

I’m currently accomplishing the above using NANT to perform the build, and using Cruise Control to just pass in command line options for which environment(s) to build and deploy. I have a Nant config file with a list of all of my environments, and an associated label each environment should currently be using. This file gets manually updated whenever a new label is created.

I know the approach I’m using for NANT probably won’t be the same as with Team Build, but has anyone done something similar with Team Build and could share how you accomplished it?

Answer 1

To answer the question, the way I addressed this was to use a combination of a custom build task, cruise control, and msbuild.

The custom build task allowed me to get the latest version from a specific branch and label.

Cruise control allowed me to pass in specific information for a specific build to MSbuild, using a config file, but initiate the build from a UI.

msbuild was used like normal, however it was called from cruise control, and the custom build task did most of the work.