Question

We have a single solution on which we want to start doing gated check-ins. The biggest problem we’re facing is that we want the build agents to build all of the configurations and platforms (ASCII and Unicode on 32 and 64 bit) to validate the changes.
We could do this with one build agent and run them in sequence but that will take far to long for continuous integration, so that’s not an option.

We could have 4 different build definitions that would build on 4 different agents, but we don’t see anyway to have a gated build run 4 different build definitions on a gated build.

I suppose we could do it with a manual process of having the developer shelve their changes then manually kick of the 4 build agents building with the shelf set and only check in when they all succeed, however we’d much prefer a more automated process.

Does anyone know of a way to do this?

Thanks

Answer 1

You should be able to parallelize gated check-in builds using the Parallel Build Template – see a detailed description on Jim Lamb’s blog.

Note that there is a potential “gotcha” when using this with gated check-in: by default, Team Foundation Server will take an exclusive (check out) lock when you pend a change on binary files. When the parallel build template runs as part of gated check-in, it will unshelve your checkin shelveset on the multiple build agents. This will fail if you have binary files as part of the gated check-in.

Thus, you’ll either need to avoid including binary files in your parallelized gated check-ins, or you’ll need to turn off exclusive check-outs for binary files.