Hosted Microsoft TFS – Team Foundation Service – Part 3: Configure a build server to work with TFSpreview

Author: Tobias Zimmergren
http://www.zimmergren.net | http://www.tozit.com | @zimmergren

Introduction

A while back an announcement was made that TFSPreview.com had been made available for general testing. Various bloggers at Microsoft put an invitation token in their MSDN blogs so everyone can have a go at it.

In this article series we’ll take a very quick look at what the hosted TFS solution by Microsoft looks like.

Articles currently in the series:

Getting your first scheduled build up and running

In order to get a scheduled build that talks to your TFSPreview repository, you’ll need to follow these steps and make sure the prerequisites are fulfilled.

Prerequisites

• Install the Build Service for the Team Foundation Server 2011 Developer Preview
  This download contains Visual Studio 2011 Developer Preview with TFS 2011 Developer Preview
• Preferably a separate machine aimed for builds.

Note: If you don’t have SharePoint 2010 installed, the installer have an option for installing SharePoint Foundation 2010 for you. In my case however, I’ve got SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise running already.

Installing the package

First of all, launch the ISO file that was extracted from the downloaded package and you should see this screen:

We want to install Team Foundation Server before we proceed, so choose the first option under the Install headline, which will bring you to this dialog:

You’ll need to accept the EULA and if you’re awesome you’ll keep the second checkbox checked so Microsoft can review any issues that may be encountered during the process so they can have a look at them pre-RTM. Click Continue and then click Install Now in the dialog that follows:

You may or may not need to reboot the computer while it’s performing the installation, depending on whether you’ve had some of the prerequisite artifacts installed prior to the installation or not.

Now just sit tight for a while as the installer takes care of the installation for you. Grab a newspaper, get a coffee, check some important stuff on Twitter or simply multitask with other things while you wait.

When it’s done, you’ll have a few options of what type of installation you want to do:

Please note: At this point you have several options for how to proceed with your installation. You can now choose one of the following installation options:

• Configure Team Foundation Application Server
• Configure Team Foundation Server Proxy
• Configure Team Foundation Build Service
• Configure Extensions for SharePoint Products

In my case I’ll be choosing the "Configure Team Foundation Build Service" since I only need the actual Build Agents and Build Service – the TFSpreview.com is hosting the actual TFS server.

Next step will present you with a dialog like the following, where you’ll have to choose what default team project collection to utilize for the build server. Since we don’t have TFS installed the box is currently empty, but fear not for your TFS server is hosted in the cloud (tfspreview.com, remember?) so we’ll just have to go and add that connection as well.

Click the "Browse…" button to open the dialog for choosing your TFS connection

If you haven’t already connected to a TFS server, this dropdown will be empty. Click "Servers…":

Click the "Add…" button:

Finally enter the URL to your TFS collection and click "OK":

You will see a dialog that enables you to log in to the services (use the Login details you signed up with for tfspreview.com):

When the sign-in is completed you’ll see that you now have a list of TFS collections. Choose your DefaultCollection (or otherwise) and click "Connect":

It should hopefully say something like this, telling you there’s no build servers unless you’ve already configured it previously:

In the next dialog I’ll choose "Use the default setting" for my setup:

In the next dialog you’ll have to choose credentials for your build rig. I’m using a dedicated domain account called SHAREPOINTSPBuild:

Make sure you validate the configuration and then press "Next"

If awesomeness is found on your machine, it should look something like this:

Click the "Configure" button and let the installer have its way for a while. Hopefully all these fancy green icons will show you that things went smoothly:

With that done, in the next dialog you’ll see a nice "Success" message and you’re ready to start creating and work with your build agents:

Validate the Build Server

On your Start Menu, you should find the following new shortcut:

Clicking the "Team Foundation Server Administration Console" should bring you forth the following dialog where you can validate that your machine is properly up and running with a build server and agents. Click the "Build Configuration" option in the menu to the left and make sure your build agents are running under the controller:

Summary

If you’ve followed along with the steps in this post you’ll see how easy it is to get up and running with creating a build server (controllers+agents) for your TFS. In this case, I chose to do a connection to the TFSpreview-hosted TFS account.

In my next post in this series I’ll talk about how you can create a new build from Visual Studio 2010 from your dev-machine and have it automatically build on this build server. Gotta love automation!

Enjoy.