In this post I will show how to create a new build definition in TFS 2010 using the TFS API. When creating a build definition manually, using Team Explorer, the necessary steps are lined out in the New Build Definition Wizard: So, lets see how the code looks like, using the same order. To start off, we need to connect to TFS
and get a reference to the IBuildServer object: TfsTeamProjectCollection server = newTfsTeamProjectCollection(newUri("http://<tfs>:<port>/tfs")); server.EnsureAuthenticated(); IBuildServer buildServer = (IBuildServer) server.GetService(typeof (IBuildServer)); General First we create a IBuildDefinition object for the team project
and set a name
and description for it: var buildDefinition = buildServer.CreateBuildDefinition(teamProject); buildDefinition.Name = "TestBuild"; buildDefinition.Description = "description here..."; Trigger Next up, we set the trigger type. For this one, we set it to individual which corresponds to the Continuous Integration - Build each check-in trigger option buildDefinition.ContinuousIntegrationType = ContinuousIntegrationType.Individual; Workspace For the workspace mappings, we create two mappings here, where one is a cloak. Note the user of $(SourceDir) variable, which is expanded by Team Build into the sources directory when running the build. buildDefinition.Workspace.AddMapping("$/Path/project.sln", "$(SourceDir)", WorkspaceMappingType.Map); buildDefinition.Workspace.AddMapping("$/OtherPath/", "", WorkspaceMappingType.Cloak); Build Defaults In the build defaults, we set the build controller
and the drop location. To get a build controller, we can (for example) use the GetBuildController method to get an existing build controller by name: buildDefinition.BuildController = buildServer.GetBuildController(buildController); buildDefinition.DefaultDropLocation = @\\SERVER\Drop\TestBuild;
Process So far, this wasy easy. Now we get to the tricky part. TFS 2010 Build is based on Windows Workflow 4.0. The build
process is defined in a separate .XAML file called a Build
Process Template. By default, every new team team project containtwo build
process templates called DefaultTemplate
and UpgradeTemplate. In this sample, we want to create a build definition using the default template. We use te QueryProcessTemplates method to get a reference to the default for the current team project //Get default template var defaultTemplate = buildServer.QueryProcessTemplates(teamProject).Where(p => p.TemplateType == ProcessTemplateType.Default).First(); buildDefinition.
Process = defaultTemplate; There are several build
process templates that can be set for the default build
process template. Only one of these are required, the ProjectsToBuild parameters which contains the solution(s)
and configuration(s) that should be built. To set this info, we use the ProcessParameters property of thhe IBuildDefinition interface. The format of this property is actually just a serialized dictionary (IDictionary<string, object>) that maps a key (parameter name) to a value which can be any kind of object. This is rather messy, but fortunately, there is a helper class called WorkflowHelpers inthe Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Workflow namespace, that simplifies working with this persistence format a bit. The following code shows how to set the BuildSettings information for a build definition: //Set
process parameters varprocess = WorkflowHelpers.DeserializeProcessParameters(buildDefinition.ProcessParameters); //Set BuildSettings properties BuildSettings settings = newBuildSettings(); settings.ProjectsToBuild = newStringList("$/pathToProject/project.sln"); settings.PlatformConfigurations = newPlatformConfigurationList(); settings.PlatformConfigurations.Add(newPlatformConfiguration("Any CPU", "Debug"));
process.Add("BuildSettings", settings); buildDefinition.ProcessParameters = WorkflowHelpers.SerializeProcessParameters(process); The other build
process parameters of a build definition can be set using the same approach Retention Policy This one is easy, we just clear the default settings
and set our own: buildDefinition.RetentionPolicyList.Clear(); buildDefinition.AddRetentionPolicy(BuildReason.Triggered, BuildStatus.Succeeded, 10, DeleteOptions.All); buildDefinition.AddRetentionPolicy(BuildReason.Triggered, BuildStatus.Failed, 10, DeleteOptions.All); buildDefinition.AddRetentionPolicy(BuildReason.Triggered, BuildStatus.Stopped, 1, DeleteOptions.All); buildDefinition.AddRetentionPolicy(BuildReason.Triggered, BuildStatus.PartiallySucceeded, 10, DeleteOptions.All); Save It!
And we’re done, lets save the build definition: buildDefinition.Save(); That’s it!
