Shmulik Segal, the head of the ALM team at Sela delivered a presentation on building software with TFS 2010. With a true-to-life story about a fictitious team of developers trying to deliver a product, he took us through the steps to creating a robust automatic build infrastructure for our product: from relying on drops provided by a developer, generated on his local machine, to an automatic build on a dedicated build server.
From this point, Shmulik showed us how to make our build stronger, by adding rules and policies that must be satisfied, such as architectural decisions, coding standards and the like, we can make code-reviews easier, by relegating the validation to the build-server, and providing feedback on the quality of our code within minutes of checking it in, rather than at the end of the release (if ever).
The talk also included:
- how to customize build definitions
- how to create and customize TFS build workflows with WF 4.0
- Comparisons between xml scripts of previous versions and other build systems, and the TFS workflow-based engine
- How to create your own custom build activities
Thanks Shmulik for a deep and advanced presentation on end to end building with TFS 2010
Today Yuval Mazor and I gave the talk above in front of ~20 people, as part of the ALM day of Sela Group’s Dev Days 2011. People were quite receptive – and I believe we got them to understand not only how you do things in TFS 2010, but also why. Some of the things we talked about:
- Best practices for managing software development projects with TFS 2010
- What are work items and how to use them (including customizations and links)
- How to properly build a branching plan
- Where and how to apply automated builds and CI
Unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to cover TFS 2010 reports in detail – which means another talk is in order!
The presentation is available online here.
Thanks to Shai Raiten for the photography:
A big thank-you to our audience – it was great having you!