How can I control the order of builds in TFS 2010 when common library is checked in?

Question

I have a TFS 2010 with some projects and a common library used in 5 of them. We use VS 2013 and we have Rolling Builds enabled in most if not all build definitions. When the common library is checked in, all of the projects referencing it are recompiled - but the order is poor, the most commonly used project is compiled as the last one. Is there a way to change that so it gets compiled first?

Answer 1

This question hints at a lot of problems and possible solutions. The simplest answer is probably to just add more build servers to run all the builds in parallel.

Otherwise you need to consider turning off rolling builds and writing your own build scheduler. That or other strategies such as building the DLL once and checking it in as source to the other builds or running the build on a branch that is outside of the other 5 builds and merging the source into those builds when they want to pick up the change.

If you are otherwise happy with how things are now and don't want to do a lot of work to solve the problem.... then just scale out your build farm with additional agents.

Answer 2

There's a "Priority in queue" on the build definition, but it sounds like you might want to change your solution's > Project Dependencies' > Build Order?