We use a few tweaked Build Process Template, developed for TFS2010 for all of our builds, but these BPTs are not using any custom activities. We recently upgraded to TFS2012, and during the upgrade converted our BPTs according to these instructions.
This works fine, most of the time, but periodically, it coughs up:
TF215097: An error occurred while initializing a build for build definition \Project1 (Dev10)\Simple – Manual: The values provided for the root activity’s arguments did not satisfy the root activity’s requirements:
‘DynamicActivity’: Expected an input parameter value of type ‘Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Workflow.Activities.BuildSettings’ for parameter named ‘BuildSettings’.
There’s nothing in any log, there’s nothing visible that I can see as the root cause in any way. The only fix is to restart the Build Controller, at which time the error vanishes for a few hours. When I unregistered and re-registered the Controller, the problem went away for about a day.
The important thing here is that these build process templates do work on TFS2012, but then they suddenly stop working for no reason I can determine.
As it turns out, some builds were still using legacy 2010-style Build Process Templates. Any time someone queued one of those builds, the entire build controller started freaking out. By getting rid of those BPTs, we resolved the issue.