Draft Builds in the new Team Build

With the new Team Build you have the possibility of working on Build Definitions in an asynchronous fashion, without impacting other team members or wasting time cloning the existing build.

For example, you might want to add some tasks to an existing Build Definition – you can then Save as a draft..

You are actually creating a clone of the existing Build Definition with the new steps you added. You can even run it!

All the builds you run with this definition are marked with a .DRAFT in the name:

This is not different compared to any other build – it is just not affecting the existing published builds:

Then once you save it everything is merged with the original definition, with no further effort.

Quickly change the TFS Integration Platform settings

You installed the TFS Integration Platform, and now you want to move your database. Or you want to change the temporary folder used during the migrations.

Shall you waste time reinstalling it?

No, what you need to do is to modify some strings in the MigrationToolServers.config file:

Pre-upgrading a large Team Project Collection to TFS 2015

TFS 2015 is out and we all rush upgrading our Team Project Collections!

But if you have a collection bigger than 1TB you should stand back and read some documentation before that. This page in particular explains what you should do if you want to upgrade such a huge collection.

The reason for using TfsPreUpgrade is very simple – you don’t want your users stuck for days while you upgrade Team Foundation Server. So the tool is going to partially upgrade the schema while the server is still available, so the actual upgrade (the one done by the installer) takes no longer than two days, which means a weekend, which also means no perceivable service interruptions.

You can run TfsPreUpgrade from whatever machine you like. In my testing environment I am using at the moment I am running it from a plain Virtual Machine which is going to be used by the Application Tier, but it has nothing installed yet. You basically need access to SQL Server, and that’s it.

First thing, run it with the Estimate switch. It will give you an idea of the time and space needed for the upgrade:

To give some context, this is data for a 2TB Collection. A few hiccups while running the Run switch might happen, especially with a temporary test environment:

but you can just relaunch TfsPreUpgrade and it would start again from the same failed point after a quick check. It is smart enough to not further expand your databases if you don’t need it:

Once it is done your offline upgrade will be much faster, because these operations were carried in advance!

Change the Release Management URL when the console is stuck

Quick one, but helpful IMHO. After updating Release Management Server or Client you might experience this:

and then you would be stuck – you can’t change the Release Management Server URL.

The quick and dirty solution would be changing the URL in the Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Release.Data.dll.config file.

A better solution is to run this command line tool, which basically automates the former. In the worst scenario, reinstall the Client and it would prompt asking for a Release Management Server URL.