Question

I’m working with Microsoft Team Foundation Server and MSDN has been fantastic so far with providing all the information I’ve needed and so much more–except in one spot.

I’m creating an automated build and under Workspace > Working Folders > Build Agent Folder, it has “$(SourceDir)” as default.

I can’t seem to figure out what that is actually referencing. Is it pointing toward the folder that the solution is in, or something else?

Answer 1

This is well explained in this article: List of variables like $(SourceDir).

For the workspace mapping dialog you can only use two variables to
help with expansion:

$(BuildDir) – Expands to BuildAgent.BuildDirectory

$(SourceDir) – Expands to $(BuildDir)\Sources by default

The directory “Sources” is not hard-coded and may be changed by
modifying the TfsBuildService.exe.config file on the build agent. If
you open that file there will be an application setting called
“SourcesSubDirectory”. If you need a shorter path you may change this
key to something like “s” instead of “Sources”. If you made this
change then the $(SourceDir) variable would expand to $(BuildDir)\s.