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Team Foundation Server 2015– New Build Agents

Team Foundation Server 2015 introduces a new agent based build system(the old  XAML Workflow based system is still supported).

From the website:

“The new builds are web- and script-based, and highly customizable. They leave behind many of the problems and limitations of the XAML builds. For example, this new system embraces the diverse set of domain-specific languages (DSLs) that developers used to build the code on their dev machines. We expect this will reduce the chances of running into the "builds fine on my machine but not on the CI server" problem. For more details, see Overview of Team Foundation Build 2015.”

Installing these new build agents is easy:

  • Open the TFS Web Access
  • Click on the Administer Server icon in the right corner image
  • Click on the Collection at the top. (In my case ‘DefaultCollection’) image
  • Click on the Build tab image
  • Click on Download Agent to download the agent as a zip fileimage
  • Extract the zip file on your build server(choose a short file path)
  • Open Powershell and invoke the ConfigureAgent.ps1 script
  • Follow the wizard

More information: https://msdn.microsoft.com/Library/vs/alm/Build/overview

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