Excluding Built Types from Alerts

Friday I got a question from one of my colleagues asking how to exclude a particular Build Type from their Alerts. I knew it could be done, but wasn't sure exactly what the proper filter would be. Thanks to Jason Prickett's blog post for some general guidance, I think we figured it out.

The easiest way to do this is to use Power Tools "Alert" interface which shows up under a Team Project in Visual Studio's Team Explorer. Simply add a 'DefinitionPath = '\TeamProject\TeamBuildType' clause. Add Or clauses if you have more than one Build Type in a Team Project you want to grab.

For those of you using Teamprise, you can install the free Visual Studio Team Explorer and use the command line tool called BisSubscribe. You can use BisSubscribe from the command line to run something similar to this:

bissubscribe.exe /eventType BuildCompletionEvent2 /server http://tfs.mycompany.com:8080 /address firstname.lastname@mycompany.com /deliveryType EmailHtml /filter "\"TeamProject\" = 'TeamProject' AND "DefinitionPath" = '\TeamProject\TeamBuildType'"

Hope this helps.

Using Command Line to search for Changeset comments.

Question: Mac, how can we search Changeset comments, recursively, for comments matching a certain string (e.g. "refactoring").

My Answer: I would just use the command line client and pipe the output to a string searcher.

Windows: tf history /server:http://tfs.mycompany.com:8080 "$/Team Project/Development" /noprompt /recursive | findstr refactoring

Linux: tf history /server:http://tfs.mycompany.com:8080 "$/Team Project/Development" /recursive | grep refactoring

*Linux is using Teamprise's Command Line Client software.

TF214007: No build was found with the URI

After making some changes to our build machine, we started getting the following error. I got asked to look into the issue and became immediately confused.

Exception Message: TF214007: No build was found with the URI vstfs:///Build/Build/14365. Either the URI does not exist, or TLR\svcTFSService does not have permission to access it. (type BuildNotFoundForUriException)

I was able to log onto the build machine and hit the PROD URL for build 14365 just fine. So I knew it couldn't be permissions. What was it? I said while scratching my head.

Six months back we migrated our TFS instance from DEV hardware to PROD data center hardware. As part of that process, we updated the DEV's Instance IDs so we didn't run into conflicts when trying to hit either site (we continue to use DEV for testing).

While any new connection to DEV would get the new Instance IDs, the legacy connections on our build servers still had the cached version of DEV's Instance IDs, which just so happen to be our PROD Instance IDs (as expected since we migrated from DEV to PROD).

So what was happing was, when someone was making changes to the build machine, they opened Visual Studio and got connected to DEV by mistake. DEV, using the cached Instance IDs (again which were PROD's), became the active TFS server somehow. So when team Build was firing off, it was actually hitting DEV, which obviously didn’t have a build URI 14365. Thus the error.

To fix this, we deleted the TFS cache on the build server. Then to test it, we purposely logged into DEV and checked our local cache. Sure enough, the new DEV entry in the cache had the new Instance IDs. All was well after that.