Grant Holliday

I’ve been thinking for a while that there’s not a lot of guidance out there on how to get Visual Studio Team Foundation Build (aka Team Build) doing more than just a compile.

My first crazy thought was that I should write a book – then I got scared when I mapped out the chapters and realised how much effort would be required and the time-to-market. I’ll leave that all to somebody else

Instead, I registered the domain TFSBuild.com and setup the .NET ScrewTurn wiki. Here’s the introduction from the homepage:

As a Build Master you’ve been put in charge of coming up with a central build system for your team. It can be quite daunting at first and you wonder “Where do I start?”.

The purpose of TFSBuild.com is to create and share build recipes with other build masters so that we can all learn and benefit from each other’s experience.

Since the site is called TFSBuild.com, there is a particular focus on MSBuild and Team Foundation Build scripts. But if you have a NAnt script or similar that you think others might find useful post it up.

The site is published as a wiki and the idea is that anybody can register to add & update content.

There are four simple options to get started:

1. Browse existing build recipes
2. Add a new build recipe
3. Use the search
4. Subscribe to the RSS feed of wiki updates.

It’s a little light on content at the moment, but I’m hoping that will change as momentum builds. Spread the word! Here are some of the recipes that I’ve put up recently based on my own experiences:

And if it doesn’t take off, at least I’ve captured my knowledge somewhere that I can refer back to later.