TFS Build 2015: First Look

Introduction
Hello, this is Esteban Garcia with Pluralsight. This is a first look at the new build system introduced with TFS 2015 and Visual Studio Online. The TFS build system has been completely revamped. It includes some very exciting changes that will allow you and your team to easily compile and deploy your applications, whether they are in. NET, Android, JavaScript, iOS, and many other technologies.

Let's Build
Hello, this is Esteban Garcia with Pluralsight. This module will show you how to start using the new build system from Visual Studio Online. The best way to show you what this new build system is all about is to dive right into the new functionality. You will first need to configure a build agent. I will take you through the prerequisites and process to configure a build agent for Windows-based builds. Once you have the build agent communicating with your Visual Studio Online account, we're going to walk through the out-of-the-box capabilities of the new build system. This will give you a good idea of what you can do with the build system, and what you should expect on the output. As part of the standard capabilities, I will show you how to build a Visual Studio solution. We will start really basic with a console application that consumes a class library. This is something that you would expect any build system to be able to easily accomplish. Going through that process will give you a way way to understand how to create a build definition, queue a build, and access the build outputs and logs. As we create this simple build definition, you will be able to see different options in action such as specifying your repository, changing variables, and as you do so you will see the change tracking features found in the new build system. You will also take a look at the built-in templates, and then I will also show you how to create your own templates.

Working with Builds
Hello, this is Esteban Garcia with Pluralsight. In this module, we're going to expand on what we covered previously, and I'm going to show you how to work with web applications and deploy them to Azure. We're also going to add some additional customizations to your builds, including getting into some PowerShell steps. As you briefly saw on the previous module, the new build system gives you access to predefined templates that include different tasks to be able to compile, test, deploy your application, and more. Some of those templates are things that you would expect to see in TFS, or Visual Studio Online, such as being able to build your Visual Studio solutions. There are templates for Xamarin, Xcode, Azure deployment, and more will be added in the future. And, of course, you can also create your own templates so you can create your own custom definitions. The new build system lets you compile web applications and also lets you run test cases as part of the build. As you become more familiar with the build system, you may want to change the location where files get staged to, or where the final assemblies get dropped to. Of course, you will need to deploy your web applications, and the build system makes that pretty easy. That includes the ability to deploy multiple web applications as part of your same solution. We will cover automated deployments to Azure through the default configuration, and through a PowerShell script.

Cross-platform
Hello, this is Esteban Garcia with Pluralsight. In this module, we're going to take a look at the cross-platform capabilities of the new TFS build system. Before this version, TFS build did not support cross-platform builds out-of-the-box. There were ways to compile code on systems other than Windows, but that required a lot of integration with other tools. The new system allows you to build cross-platform apps using the same process as you would follow if you were building a Windows-based app. This was accomplished with a cross-platform agent that can be installed on a Mac or a Linux machine. I will show you how to download and configure the cross-platform agent on a Mac. Once that is configured, and the agent is registered with Visual Studio Online, we will move on to creating a build definition and run the build. This will give you an idea of the capabilities available for cross-platform builds.