How to setup continous integration with team foundation build

July 26, 2006 8:14 am

First, I followed the instructions and used the code from the Vertigo Software guys.

Next, the issue is that to configure a new project for continuous integration, you have to modify manually the web.config of the CI service as follows:

<
appSettings

<
add

key

“
1
“

value

“
TeamProjectName=MyProject;BuildType=MyBuildType
“
/>

</
appSettings

Yuck!
What I wanted was a UI that would automatically populate dropdowns with the available projects in TFS, as well as their configured Build Types, which is the information you need to setup a new continuous integration build using this solution. Here’s the UI I built:

To set it up, you just need to unzip these files to the same location of the CI service (by default C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Web Services\CI), and add an entry in the web.config with the Url of your TFS:

<
appSettings

<
add

key

“
ServerUrl
“

value

“
http://tfs:8080
“
/>

</
appSettings

The web.config also contains the references that are needed to connect to the TFS using the client APIs:

<
compilation

debug

“
true
“

<
assemblies

<
add

assembly

“
System.Windows.Forms, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B77A5C561934E089
“
/>

<
add

assembly

“
Microsoft.TeamFoundation, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B03F5F7F11D50A3A
“
/>

<
add

assembly

“
Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.Common, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B03F5F7F11D50A3A
“
/>

<
add

assembly

“
Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B03F5F7F11D50A3A
“
/>

<
add

assembly

“
Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B03F5F7F11D50A3A
“
/>

<
add

assembly

“
Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B03F5F7F11D50A3A
“
/>

<
add

assembly

“
Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Common, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=B03F5F7F11D50A3A
“
/>

</
assemblies

</
compilation

Connecting to the server is actually pretty easy:

TeamFoundationServer server = TeamFoundationServerFactory.GetServer(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[“ServerUrl”]);

server.Authenticate();

Then, to retrieve the source control projects in TFS, you request the VersionControlServer service from the server instance:

VersionControlServer vcs = (VersionControlServer)server.GetService(typeof(VersionControlServer));

Retrieving the configured build types can be done performing a query to retrieve items from the well-known path they are stored on the server, after getting an instance of the owning project:

VersionControlServer vcs = GetSCC();

TeamProject project = vcs.GetTeamProject(projectList.SelectedValue);

ItemSet items = vcs.GetItems(“$/” + project.Name + “/TeamBuildTypes/*”);

List
<
string

buildTypes =
new
List
<
string
(items.Items.Length);

foreach (Item item in items.Items)

{

buildTypes.Add(item.ServerItem.Replace(items.QueryPath, “”).Substring(1));

}

Note that I’m removing the query path from the ServerItem property, as it contains the full server-side path to it. I must say that even without looking at the documentation, 10′ of Google search, and Reflector was all I needed to get it done. A fairly intuitive API in general.

Again, here’s the link to the download. Enjoy!

/kzu