Need advice/resources in starting nightly builds in TFS

Question

I'm currently looking to start setting up nightly builds with TFS and our company has never done this before. I'm looking for some pointers on maybe where to get started, what I should look out for as well as structure of solutions.

Background

1. Current TFS source location has 2 web projects, 5-10 windows services, 10-15 supporting dlls. These will continue to grow.
2. Currently there are solution files for each web project and each windows service. Each of these solutions contain the supporting projects (internal dlls) and also the correlating unit testing projects.
3. All of our external dependencies (log4net, nhibernate etc) are managed by NuGet and are in a folder within TFS called packages

Some of my questions include but are not limited to

1. Should I have a master solution file that contains all of these projects? Maybe this is easier when setting up nightly builds?

2. I'd also like to run the unit and integration tests as part of the nightly builds. Is this just additional configuration on the build server?

3. What tools are involved when setting up nightly builds with TFS?

I'm not necessarily looking for complete answers but it would be great if someone could point me to some good resources (books, websites, blogs)? Like I said I'm really green as far as nightly builds are concerned and I just want to make sure I start off on the right foot. Hopefully I can learn from others mistakes.

Answer 1

Here are some simple "answers" to your 3 questions (though I agree with the comments above that this isn't the most answer-able SO question):

• An good read on creating reliable builds in MSBuild : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd483291.aspx

• Yes running tests is just an option in a TFS Build Definition, you can configure a few options in addition to "on/off" : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms253138.aspx You can also use TFS Lab management and test agents to execute tests in a different manner: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/lab_management/archive/2009/05/18/vsts-2010-lab-management-basic-concepts.aspx

• Configuring TFS builds : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd647547.aspx