SP2010 Continuous Integration - pt 3: Creating your first TFS Build Process for SharePoint projects

The 3^rd article on Continuous Integration for SharePoint 2010 is now live on the official SharePoint Developer blog – Creating your first TFS Build Process for SharePoint projects. As before I will post an overview here, but the content itself is on the MSDN blog. This one is another lengthy article (by me this time), and should be good information for those looking to get automated builds running or those just curious.

The article picks up where the last one (Configuring a TFS Environment with Test Controller, Test Agent, and Build Server) left off - you have a TFS build server running (and can build a plain .Net app), but so far it is not able to build SharePoint projects since it does not have the assemblies installed. This article answers questions such as:

• What setup do I need to do to build SharePoint projects?
• How do I get my WSPs to build automatically? (e.g. on each check-in/as part of a nightly build etc.)
• How do I create my first build definition?
• The build process is now a .NET 4 workflow instead of MSBuild – how do I make a change to the process?
• How should I deal with dependencies between projects?

That link again is Creating your first TFS Build Process for SharePoint projects.

The next article will be “Implementing assembly versioning for SharePoint projects”. This should be published on September 8th.

SP2010 Continuous Integration – Installing TFS2010 (inc. Build and Test agents)

It’s been a while since I posted here, but my collaborators and I are actually well into writing our article series on Continuous Integration for SharePoint 2010. As Mike Morton posted a few weeks back on the official SharePoint Developer blog, the rest of the series will now be published there. When each article is published I’ll post a quick summary here and update links in my kick-off post.

Anyway, the main news is that the 2^nd article in the series has been live there for few days – – see Configuring a TFS Environment with Test Controller, Test Agent, and Build Server (Kirk Evans).

Kirk (a Microsoft Principal PFE) did a great job. MSDN is referenced throughout (in case you need more detail), but the article is easy to digest and makes the ideal starting point for initial installation and configuration (we think). The article shows you how to:

• Create appropriate service accounts for TFS
• Create a distributed TFS 2010 environment, where the build server(s) are separate from other services such as source control (recommended topology)
• N.B. If you already have TFS 2010 for source control and just want to get started with automated builds, you can skip to the ‘Install the Build Service on the TFSBuild Machine’ section and pick up there
• Install and configure the TFS build service (build controller/build agent)
• Install and configure Visual Studio 2010 test infrastructure (test controller/test agent)
• Configure optional TFS functionality such as SQL Reporting Services and SharePoint site/dashboard for tracking velocity and issues
• Verify configuration by creating a test build

That link again is Configuring a TFS Environment with Test Controller, Test Agent, and Build Server (Kirk Evans).

The next article will be “Creating your first TFS Build Process for SharePoint projects”. This should be published on August 25^th, and discusses creating a build definition to build WSP files (and more).