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Integrate JAVA development in your Team Foundation Environment

At our company, we are integrating JAVA development on our Team Foundation Server 2010 environment. Thanks to Team Explorer Everywhere and the nice Eclipse integration, this is very easy to do. So our JAVA developers can benefit from all the rich features offered by TFS.

There was only one step left to configure, integrating the JAVA build environment with TFS. Turns out, that this is very easy to achieve thanks to the Team Foundation Build Extensions. It provides the ability to execute Ant or Maven 2 builds from Team Foundation Server and publish the results of the build along with any associated JUnit test results back to Team Foundation Server.  This not only works for Team Foundation Server 2010, but also for Team Foundation Server 2005 and Team Foundation Server 2008.

How to get this done?

First install the JAVA JDK, Ant (if Ant support is required) or Maven 2 (if Maven support is required) on your build server. Afterwards install the build extensions on the build machine. In addition, you should configure the appropriate environment variables (i.e. JAVA_HOME, ANT_HOME, M2_HOME) as per the relevant install guidance for Ant and Maven. These environment variables should point to the correct install locations.

As a last step, you must create a build definition which makes use of them.  The easiest way to do this is to use a Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer Everywhere client to create the build definition.

That’s all!

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