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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-18T10:02:02+00:00

When we used TFS 2008 (SP1) we used to be able to access the

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When we used TFS 2008 (SP1) we used to be able to access the “Reason” MSBuild property, which contained the reason the build was running. This was available as soon as the build started, so no task/target needed to fetch it. Now we’re using TFS 2010 (and MSBuild / Upgrade Template, not Workflow) and the property is no longer populated. I could write a custom task to retrieve the info from IBuildDetail, but isn’t there a property immediately available to my MSBuild scripts? I used to be able to do conditional MSBuild script imports based on the build reason and this will not work if I have to use a task/target to fetch the reason.

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  1. Editorial Team

    You are still using MSBuild scripts, so I assume you are using the Upgrade Template. You can clone/edit or modify the Upgrade Template so that the template takes the current build reason and passes it to MSBuild via the Run TfsBuild for Configuration Folder activity. Open the template for edit in Visual Studio and do the following:

    Select the Run On Agent activity and go to the Variables tab. Create a new variable to store the build reason and populate its default value using info from the IBuildDetail. Add something like the following to the list of variables:

    Name: currentBuildReason
Variable type: String
Scope: Run On Agent
Default: BuildDetail.Reason.ToString()

    Next, click on the Properties dialog for the Run TfsBuild for Configuration Folder activity. Select the CommandLineArgument elipses to open the dialog that passes arguments to TFSBuild. You probably only see one variable listed:

    MSBuildArguments

    You can now add the current build reason to the command line arguments (and still pass any existing MSBuildArguments), similar to this:

    String.Format("/p:CurrentBuildReason={0} {1}", currentBuildReason, MSBuildArguments)

    Click OK to close the dialog. That will pass the current build reason as a new argument named CurrentBuildReason and it can be referenced as $(CurrentBuildReason) in your MSBuild scripts.

    Save and check-in the Upgrade Template.
    Assign the template to a Build Definition. The MSBuild scripts used by that definition can now use the variable as described above.

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