Building Silverlight applications with Team Foundation Build
This week, I’ve tried to build a team build for a project I’m working on. I found it weird that for some reason, building the server solutions worked just fine, but I wasn’t able to build the silverlight solutions - it always failed. Looking a bit in the log file, I saw that the build failed because it couldn’t copy the .XAP files of the silverlight application from the ClientBin folder. Checking a bit further and I found that the files were never created !
After searching the internet I found out the problem – I’ve installed the Build server after it already had silverlight SDK installed on it – apparently there is a significance to the order of installations – you need to install the build server first and then install the silverlight SDK.
If you’ve already installed SL and then the Build server, just reinstall the SL SDK and it will work.
Another problem I’ve encountered afterwards was a problem with the build order of the silverlight projects – It seemed that MSBuild did not recognize correctly the order of the projects to build and it missed some projects and caused the build to fail, but setting the dependencies for the missing projects fixed that (strange how everything works fine when building solutions in the IDE).