At work we run TFS2010 with build controllers, build agents and lab management. I have customised the build workflow so that we can get a lot more functionality out of the automated build process. Some of these customisations are things like:
- Finding the product version number
- Incrementing the product version number
- Updating the build name with the new product version
- Updating files prior to compilation
- Updating files after compilation
- Building Sandcastle documentation
- Deploying MSIs to remove servers
- Filtering drop folder output (no source, just build output like configuration files, documentation and MSIs)
I use CodePlex at home for my personal projects. This means that I don’t get all the goodness that comes with TFSBuild in 2010. I still want the automatic version management functionality listed above however. I have the following functionality requirements to make this happen:
- Determine the current product version number
- Increment the product version number
- Must be done prior to any project compilation
- Sync Wix project versioning with product version number
- Needs to happen before wix project compilation
- Needs to cater for wix variables being used for version information
- Allow TFS checkout for files under source control
- This is important so that incremented version numbers continue to increment from previous version under source control
- Must also cater for when solution is loaded without TFS availability (broken source control bindings etc)
- Push product/wix version into wix output name
- Failure to execute these actions successful will fail the solution/project build
- No installation required
- No configuration required
- All customisation of tasks is done using command line arguments
- Extensible using MEF
- Again, no configuration required to add new tasks
The next post will outline how I was able to make this happen using an extensible MEF task based application.
Tags: TFS, WiX, Sandcastle, MEF