TFS Build Agent Fail on Get Source After Upgrade

TFS on premise requires you to keep your TFS updated as almost in every quarter a new update to the TFS is released as well as a new version every year. For this you might have to do TFS Upgrades. If you have upgraded from TFS 2015 to TFS 2018 you have to remove the version 1.xx build agents and configure version 2.xx build agents. Your existing build might encounter workspace issues and may not be able to get sources downloaded to build, in the build agents after the upgrade of agents done. Let’s look at how we can get this issue resolved.

Updating TFS Build Agents from Version 1.xx to 2.xx After TFS Upgrade 2018 from TFS 2015

If you have upgraded the TFS from TFS 2015 to TFS 2018 you will encounter a situation where your vNext build agents 1.xx are no longer valid. You will get a message in the Agent Pool/Queue indicating that the agents are deprecated and you need to migrate them. Let’s understand the steps required to migrate your TFS build agents from 1.xx to 2.xx.

Script to Delete All Workspaces of a Computer from TFS

Sometime you need to clean up machines, especially build servers after a TFS upgrade to get the agents working as intended. If you ever come across a situation where you want to remove all Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) workspaces from TFS for a given machine, considering all collections and all users, the script available here will help you to do that.

TFS 2015.2 to TFS 2018 Upgrade–Lesson Learnt

It is great if the latest updates to TFS can be applied as and when they are released. But for a large organization it might not be sometimes easy. There may be few version gaps when you try to upgrade your TFS. Let’s discuss a problem with SQL server, faced while upgrading from TFS 2015.2 to TFS 2018, and how can it be fixed without getting into deeper troubles. This upgrade was done after a pre production trial using a clone of the TFS 2015.2, and no issues faced during TFS2015.2 from to TFS 2018 in the trial steps, which were exactly followed in production, except for clone TFS 2015.2 of course. Still in a production scenario you might run into unexpected .

Creating Multiple Artifacts in a Single Build

Sometime you may want to create multiple artifacts in a build for separate each project output into different artifact. This question was asked in a forum “To create CI/CD pipeline to deploy web application and windows service on different VMs there is a need to create separate artifacts, for both project. How artifacts for all projects can be published separately in a CI pipeline ?” To answer that question, let’s look at very simple implementation possibility in VSTS/TFS builds.

Running UI Tests with Unified Agent

You needed to setup dedicated machines for testing when using Run Functional Tests and you had to execute, Deploy Test Agent step and Copy Files step as prerequisites. With the introduction of unified agent enabling build, deployment and testing using same agent, now it is possible to setup pool of machines as Test clients to cater multiple project needs. You can even deploy and test using the same agent if you wish to do so.  Unified agent support is available to run tests as multi-machine distributed execution. You do not require to execute copy files task as artifacts downloaded by the agent can be used for running tests. Let’s look at how to prepare a unified agent for running UI tests.

PS Script Get All Team Projects Listed as HTML–TFS/VSTS

You may want to sometimes satisfy the needs of your team, specially PMs, requesting already available information in document format. Some managers are lazy to go and explore (that's why they choose to be managers not techies) and they sometimes expect information to be delivered to their hands . List of Team projects in each collection can easily be seen on the TFS web interface or in VSTS in admin mode. But here is a PowerShell script to generate the same list as HTML file with link to the relevant team project, if someone requested you to have it as a separate document.

Build Definition as Code with YAML Builds

Build configuration as code and store it in version control was a request from some time back. It is great to have your build definition as code alongside your application source code. Microsoft has now released preview of YAML builds for this purpose to VSTS. Even though as of now it is limited to use with VSTS GIt and GitHub, version control (TFSVC not supported) to create CI builds, it is just the beginning of a new way to think about defining CI, CD pipelines and it will evolve into much greater levels in the future. Let’s get a basic YAML build done to understand what it is.