Monthly archive - May 2009

MSBuild and Team Foundation Build Follow Up

Alright it’s now obvious that this book is way more than a week’s read, and I find it hard to read straight through due to my need to go directly to the TFS parts in the back of the book for work. I do know now that it’s more valuable than I first thought using the third party tools such as Msbuildtasks and MSBuildExtensionPack. I don’t know when I will be able to completely finish the book with my current workload but so far I still have not found anything to complain about which is rare for me. Well actually if it came with a digital version it would have been nice, but the code examples are online and that will come in handy when I get to the lengthy examples. Today the Zip feature using msbuild community tasks came in handy to archive each build released to our QA environment. Tomorrow I will try to have the date included in the zip file name using the MSBuild extension pack which is in the Zip and FTP section of the book. Once again great book and thanks to the authors for the hard work.

A Book Truly Worth Its Price.

If ones goal is to be a developer of worth it’s best to understand one will never know everything about anything. While searching for an answer to an ASPNETCompiler issue with TFS building a project I stumbled upon a link to this book Inside the Microsoft® Build Engine by Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi , William Bartholomew . It immediately grabbed my attention because it’s one of a small group of books that actually cover Team Foundation Server with MSBuild. It also has relevant information as to the upcoming release of VSTS2010. Needless to say I ordered it immediately to add to the library and get a real understanding of MSBuild in and out to truly know the core of the Build Process. After receiving it at my office it helped resolved a few issues I had which saved me a few hours of research and is now serving as a great reference manual. I still have not completed the book as of yet but look forward to writing a complete review once I am done. So far saving me 2-3 hours of research makes this book worth its weight in gold. I also joined the Team System Live event for Running Interactive Build Agents for UI Testing and Debugging Organized by one of the Authors William Bartholomew. It was definitely interesting and things did not go as planned with TFS Building the project. However I will be attending future events to further my knowledge as needed in the Software industry.
Amazon Book Details

Product Description
The build process when code gets assembled to see how and how well it works is a critical step in software development. Developers had few options for customizing the build process before Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008, but the Microsoft Build Engine (MSBuild) enables developers to customize each step during a build. MSBuild is extensible and uses an XML file to describe each step, allowing the build master or developer to easily change and augment how projects are built. This book offers hands-on guidance for customizing MSBuild, and provides a cookbook of examples on Web deployment, automated releases, and other essential topics. It also covers Visual Studio Team Foundation Build, the build engine in Visual Studio Team System.