[Team System] TFS 2008 - Better Build Support, But Good Enough?

I picked up the blog post written by Buck Hodges today about some of the new features related to Build in TFS 2008. I'm glad to see CI built into the product and better control of the build process as well as better support for editing the build steps. Not that I fear editing some XML, but GUI support is always welcome as long as you can do some 80% of what you normally need to do in that interface.

The build support in TFS 2005 is, compared to some other build servers out there, not top notch. When we started a version 2 of a project just recently, I moved our whole build process to CruiseControl.NET. It took me a day or so to get the basic structure of 10+ solutions (and CI projects) to build and deploy. The same stuff took me days and days to set up in TFS. So now we're building and deploying wcf services, generating data contracts from schemas, generating service proxies from those services and even generating service proxy documentation with reflection. Everything controlled by Cruise Control. And I like cctray :)

It looks like MS is trying hard to step up to the features offered by solutions like CC.NET, but I think it will take some real effort to make developers used to CC, NUNIT and NANT to make the final move.

1 Comment

  • I haven't looked into the details of what is comming for

    It will take some real effort to get developers to switch because it will take a lot of effort to get to the level of functionality of CC.Net.

    I've been using MsBuild rather than nAnt, but CC.Net is still what brings it all together.

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