Team Foundation Build 2010 Introduction

Introducing Team Foundation Build 2010
Hello everyone. This is David Starr and welcome to this course, which provides an introduction to team foundation build 2010, which is a fundamental component of Team Foundation Server 2010. Now this first module assumes really that we've never seen team foundation build before and maybe you're even new to build automation in general. We'll take a quick lap around the complete technology in this module before moving on to see how we might use team foundation build as a tool to expand our build automation techniques and strategies. Before diving right into team foundation build, we'll talk a little bit about build automation in general, what it might provide for us, how it can make our lives better. After we see what team foundation build is, we'll see what's new in 2010. A lot of people were using team build in versions 2008 of Team Foundation Server and there are some significant changes, so we'll tour those quickly. After checking out those new features, we'll look at build alert and notifications, ways to stay informed and keep up-to-date about what's going on with our build system and then finally we'll see what are we really going for in the end game overall build automation solution that we might be working toward.

The Build Environment
Hello my name is David Starr and welcome to this the second module of the introduction to Team Foundation Build 2010 course. In this module we're going to talk about our build environment. All the parts and pieces we need to get Team Foundation Build working for us. Specifically in this module we're going to cover installation and configuration of our build services. Oftentimes it helps just to know how to get started, so we'll walk through that. Also we'll take a look at defining simple builds, that is simple sort of out of the box, your bare bones builds just to get us off the ground, get some builds started, and once we've done that we'll look at the different aspects of managing those builds and the build artifacts.

Simple Build Automation
Hello this is David Starr. Welcome to this module on simple build automation with Team Foundation Build. In this module we're going to spend some time learning about some of the core elements of Team Foundation Build that we really need in order to start taking great advantage of our shiny new build system with Team Foundation Build. Specifically in this module we're going to spend a lot of time examining build definitions. We're going to see what they are and check out many of the options that they make available to us as we go about managing our build strategy. Understanding build definitions is the first step to becoming truly proficient in team foundation build. We'll also see the notion of buddy builds and private builds and gated check-in. Gated check-in is a really cool feature, however is new in 2010, that gives us the capability of never breaking a build again, even in a situation where we've configured our build as a continuous integration build. Gated check-in itself is a form of continuous integration, just happens to be one that ensures we'll never check in code that would break an existing CI build. And finally we'll look at build reports that give us a sense of how our builds are trending over time, what's the build quality, what are some trends of code coverage and code churn and things like this that our build can measure. Well build reports are the way we get to visualize information about all of those things.

Working with Build Process Templates (Scripts)
Hello this is David Starr. Welcome to this module on the Team Foundation Build 2010 course where we're going to spend a lot of time getting our hands on some build scripts. Now the heart and soul of any build automation process is really the build process templates or the build scripts themselves. We're going to start by simply creating a Hello World type build script application and building on it from there. We'll then take a look at execution scope and see what executes where throughout the build process and finally how we can pass arguments into those build scripts from our build definitions. Then we'll look at script variables, how different activities within our build script workflow can share information between themselves and lastly we'll look at a special activity, the invoke process activity, which many build engineers find indispensable.

Migrating from TFS 2008
Hello, this is David Starr and in our last module for the Team Foundation Build 2010 introductory course we're going to be looking at issues relating to migrating from your Team Foundation Server in Team Build 2008 because you've got a big investment perhaps in your 2008 build environment and just simply flipping the switch to upgrade to 2010 might seem like a daunting task considering that we're moving away from a fundamentally MS Build environment to a fundamentally WF workflow based environment.