We are using the "new, scriptable build system" of TFS 2015 and all of a sudden one of our build definitions is gone. It seems that it deleted itself.
Is there a way to undelete/recover a build definition?
Where are the build definitions (those JSON files) acutally stored?
If you are on prem and you just chose delete from the GUI... run this in the TFS database for your specific id:
update Build.tbl_Definition
set Deleted = 0 --was 1
where DefinitionId = <your build ID goes here>
You will loose your build history without some extra work i did not take the time to dig into, but that might also be do-able.
NOTE: You will also loose credentials stored as build parameters you will need to recreate. Might even be best for you to recreate a new build using this as a template to avoid other unknowns.
TFS build definitions are not version controlled items. So, It's not possible to restore the deleted build definitions for now.
There has been a feature request in uservoice: provide a way to version-control build definitions According to the response from PM, this is still in process.
In the new build system coming with TFS 2015 you can see the full
history of the changes to your build definition. The feature that is
currently missing is the ability to undo or rollback to a previous
revision.
We expect to get the rollback deployed to our service in the next few
months.
Chris Patterson
Program Manager
Moreover, the build definitions are stored in the TFS database.
Related
I have a folder in TFS which has SQL Scripts. At the moment I am manually adding a comment and updating a version number inside the comment every time i make a change and check it back it. This works however was hoping there might be a better way. Is there a way to automate this in TFS?
I have read the following article
Version control project files
do i have to go through such a process for simple .sql files? Are there any other simple ways.
There are a few ways you can do this:
Create an automated build in TFS and write a custom build step / PowerShell script to parse the appropriate SQL scripts, read the version, increment it, and store the new version by either checking in the updated file or a local store
Use a database project (part of SQL Server Data Tools) which will output a DACPAC. Inside the database project, you can set the version as specified here. This stores the version in the project file. If you update your TFS build number to be digits only, you can then update the project file to set that value to match the build using a custom build task. For example, if your build number was yyyy.m.d.R where R is the number of times that build was run today (TFS manages that - it's the revision variable). Or, you could set the the <DacVersion> tag to something like 2.1.0.0 and your build replaces the last digit with yyyymmddr.
I'd recommend using a database project. It's pretty easy to create a new database project off an existing database.
The first way mentioned by Jacob above can achieve that if you just want to incremental the version number of the script/folder, just create a CI build definition.
Actually you can just enable Label sources and set the Label format with predefined environment variables such as $(build.buildNumber), and set without publish any artifacts during build process.
Thus, it will automatically trigger the CI build when you check in files, and the source (SQL Script /folder) will be labeled with the incremental number.
Then you can find the specific versions with the label.
After (or before) we convert from TFS 2012.2 to TFS 2015.3 (which we have done just fine in a test run) we would like to revert our team project to the standard TFS 2015 Agile process template, and no longer use the customized agile process that we had modified from TFS 2012. We are quite willing to delete all of our work items and start over, but need to keep the team project history and change sets. Anyone know how to do this? Answers to prior questions on this did not address this situation. Thanks.
There is no easy way to do it. Basically the steps require you to use a lot of witadmin commands. Start by deleting any work item types that were added and don't exist in the default template.
Then push the standard work item definition for each work item type.
Then push the categories
Then push the process configuration
Then delete any fields that are no longer used
That should bring you back to the standard template.
An alternative you could try is to use the WitMorph project. You can write a set of rules to migrate your data back into working order.
We've been using TFS since around 2009 when we installed TFS2008. We upgraded to TFS2010 at some point and we've been using it for source control, work item management, builds etc.
Our TFSVersionControl.mdf file is 287,120,000 KB (273GB). We ran some queries and found that our tbl_BuildInformationField table is massive. It has 1,358,430,452 rows which takes up 150,988,624 KB (143GB). We have multiple active products over multiple active builds which more than one solution per build and the solutions aren't free of warning messages.
My questions:
Is it possible to stop MSBuild from spamming the
tbl_BuildInformationField table so much? I.e. only write errors and
general build information and not all the warnings for every
project?
Is there a way to purge or clean up old data from this
table?
Is 273GB for 4 years of TFS use an average size?
Is 143GB for tbl_BuildInformationField a "normal" size?
The table holds the values and output of build process. Take note that build retention policy doesnt actualy delete the build object like everything else in TFS the object is marked deleted and only public visibility and drop location is cleared.
I would suggest if you have retainened same build definitions for very long time (when build definition is deleted the related objects get removed as well) you should query for build info including deleted ones using TFS api, the same api will also alow you to remove them for good. Deleting build definitions probably will not work and will fail with timeout error.
You can consult the following:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/adamroot/archive/2009/06/12/working-with-deleted-build-data-in-team-foundation-server-2010-beta-1.aspx
We are using TFS 2010 (Visual Studio) for our deployments and have client code projects (.csproj files) and database projects (.dbproj files) We understand that when our Developers add files to our application there is a corresponding reference to these files in the Project file. If I push a changeset from Dev to QA that includes the project file, and the project file contains a reference to a file that's been added that is not in the changeset, I will receive a build error.
Once we started pushing just changesets (as opposed to performing full builds) this quickly became our number one bottleneck in doing TFS builds. I would deploy the database project and there would be 20 errors. The only way I could correct them was to navigate down the entire solution explorer tree and exclude each orphaned reference individually. This has proved far too time consuming and on the advice of our lead programmer we have returned to doing full builds of QA and UAT.
We are in the early stages of this product, and therefore we will be adding many files for some time. We need a better solution for this problem. Neither the manual exclusions nor asking developers to not check in code until it is ready for qa will suffice for us. Has anybody out there had any experience with this problem and if so how did you deal with it? Thanks!
Jon
Pushing changesets to QA selectively is known as cherry picking and causes the sorts of issues that you are experiencing. This is not the recommended practice, instead setup the Qa build so that successful build is part of checkin. This way that if a part of a fix is missed ( as it may be in multiple change sets ) the build will fail and the checkin cannot be performed.
Second have the developers do the second checkin to QA or merge the dev change sets to Qa and have the team lead coordinate changes to project files by watching for changes by turning on "notify changes made by others " or setting a policy for the dev team. Full builds should always be done as partials do not always pick up the complete pick up the dependency graph.
We have a particular file, say X.zip that is only modified by 1 or 2 people. Hence we don't want the build to trigger on every check-in, as the other files are mostly untouched.
I need to check for a condition prior to building, whether the checked-in item is "X.zip" or not.. if yes, then trigger a build, else don't. We use only CI builds.
Any idea on how to trigger the build only when this particular file is checked-in? Any other approaches would be greatly appreciated as i am a newbie in TFS...
Tara.
I don't know of any OOTB feature which can do this, what you would need to do is write your own custom MSBuild task which is executed prior to the build running (pre-build action).
The task will then need to use the TFS API to check the current check in for the file you want and if it's not found you'll have to set the task to failed.
This isn't really ideal as it'll indicate to Team Build a build failure, which, depending on whether you're using check in policies, may be unhelpful. It'd also be harder to at-a-glance work out which builds failed because of the task and which failed because of a real problem.
You can change the build to occur less frequently rather than every check in, which will reduce load on your build server.
Otherwise you may want to dig into Cruise Control .NET, it may support better conditional builds.
If you could move X.zip into it's own folder, then you could set up a CI build with a workspace that only looked at the folder containing X.zip.
You would then need to add an explicit call to tf get to download the rest of the code as Team Build only downloads what the workspace is looking at.
But this might be simpler than the custom task approach?