Initial Results of TeampriseBuild for TFS 2005

I've spent a few hours working with TeampriseBuild and to be honest, I love it! With Martin's instructions a novice could get up and running within an hour or so (I seem to take longer due to excesive note taking and pondering). That is assuming their Ant scripts work autonomously from the initiation mechanism. In our case they are, so I was able to simply use his instructions to call an Ant file just like we'd use Anthill our CruiseControl to call an Ant script.

I did have to edit the WorkspaceMapping.xml to make sure you're not bringing down too much code. This has nothing to do with TeampriseBuild, just an observation of Team Build that is not always apparent.

I also like Martin's idea of not having to create the bogus solution file. "In a future release of Teamprise we hope to remove this restriction". While it's easy to crate the bogus solution file, it would be nice to avoid this. It just confuses people more than anything.

We did need one deviation from Martin's write-up. To get the logging correct we had to change the TFSBuild.rsp file to use /v:d, which is detailed logging for MSBuild, instead of /v:n. /v:n did not give us the Ant's standard output. However /v:d did. So while you have to dig through a bunch of MSBuild junk, you do get to see the output returned by Ant.

Some of our Ant scripts take care of their own logging so it's not a big deal. But it would be nice to not see all the "detail" information in the log file and just get back Ant's standard output.

Overall, I give this effort an "A". Keep up the good work Teamprise.