I am looking at improving one of our build systems, but it's a bit of an unorganised mess. I want to add a task which is run at the end of a Release build only and after all other tasks we have such as FxCop/StyleCop/signing processes.
Is there an easy way of specifying a task that you want at the absolute end of a build? I've currently got the task running after the build (using AfterBuild Target) but this doesn't make sense for what the task is doing.
Cheers,
Jamie
The Targets tag takes "DependsOnTargets" attribute and "Condition" attribute. You can effectively use these attributes in AfterBuild.
Related
In XAML build system in VS2012, there is an check box option "Build even if nothing has changed since the previous build", when Schedule option is selected.
This is missing in VNext build and the problem is that nightly build is fired even if no code was committed during the day. In my case it takes two hours to build with complete test suite.
Is there an easy workaround or plug in to achieve this?
Thanks
In TFS VNext build system Microsoft removed this option.
I would use an alternative instance of a workaround, you can create a build definition with a CI-trigger.
Another benefits of this practice is you get fast feedback if a change can not be integrated in the code base.
In this case you maybe need more than one build agent to run parallel builds in the case of parallel check-ins.
There is a feature request for it. But I think MS will not realize this request
https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio-2015/suggestions/16300498-add-build-event-if-nothing-has-changed-since-prev
I have a bamboo build with 2 stages: Build&Test and Publish. The way bamboo works, if Build&Test fails, Publish is not run. This is usually the way that I want things.
However, sometimes, Build&Test will fail, but I still want Publish to run. Typically, this is a manual process where even though there is a failing test, I want to push a button so that I can just run the Publish stage.
In the past, I had two separate plans, but I want to keep them together as one. Is this possible?
From the Atlassian help forum, here:
https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/52863/how-do-i-run-just-a-single-stage-of-a-build
Short answer: no. If you want to run a stage, all prior stages have to finish successfully, sorry.
What you could do is to use the Quarantine functionality, but that involves re-running the failed job (in yet-unreleased Bamboo 4.1, you may have to press "Show more" on the build result screen to see the re-run button).
Another thing that could be helpful in such situation (but not for OP) is disabling jobs.
Generally speaking, the best solution to most Bamboo problems is to rely on Bamboo as little as possible because you ultimately can't patch it.
In this case, I would just quickly write / re-use a aynchronous dependency resolution mechanism (something like GNU Make and its targets), and run that from a single stage.
Then just run everything on the default all-like target, and let users select the target on a custom run variable.
Is there a way to run an ant build such that you get an output of what the build would do, but without actually doing it?
That is to say, it would list all of the commands that would be submitted to the system, output the expansion of all filesets, etc.
When I've searched 'ant' and 'test', I get overwhelming hits for running tests with ant. Any suggestions on actually testing ant build files?
It seems, that you are looking for a "dry run".
I googled it a bit and found no evidence that this is supoorted.
Heres a bugzilla-request for that feature, that explains things a bit:
https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=35464
This is impossible in theory and in practice. In theory, you cannot test a program meaningfully without actually running it (basically the halting problem).
In practice, since individual ant tasks very often depend on each other's output, this would be quite pointless for the vast majority of Ant scripts. Most of them compile some source code and build JARs from the class files - but what would the fileset for the JAR contain if the compiler didn't actually run?
The proper way to test an Ant script is to run it regularly, but on a test system, possibly a VM image that you can restory to the original state easily.
Here's a problem: You have target #1 that builds a bunch of stuff, then target #2 that copies it.
You run your Ant script in test mode, it pretends to do target #1. Now it comes to target #2 and there's nothing to copy. What should target #2 return? Things can get even more confusing when you have if and unless clauses in your ant targets.
I know that Make has a command line parameter that tells it to run without doing a build, but I never found it all that useful. Maybe that's why Ant doesn't have one.
Ant does have a -k parameter to tell it to keep going if something failed. You might find that useful.
As Michael already said, that's what Test Systems - VM's come in handy- are for
From my ant bookmarks => some years ago some tool called "Virtual Ant" has been announced, i never tried it. So don't regard it as a tip but as something someone heard of
From what the site says =
"With Virtual Ant you no longer have to get your hands dirty with XML to create or edit Ant build scripts. Work in a completely virtualized environment similar to Windows Explorer and run your tasks on a Virtual File System to see what they do, in real time, without affecting your real file system*. The actual Ant build script is generated in the background."
Hm, sounds to good to be true ;-)
..without affecting your real file system.. might be what you asked for !?
They provide a 30day trial license so you won't lose no money but only the time to have a look on..
I have MSbuild task like this to sign all the output modules of our project.
<SignFile Condition="Exists('$(OutputPath)\%(FilesToSign.identity)')"
CertificateThumbprint="$(THUMBPRINT)"
SigningTarget="$(OutputPath)\%(FilesToSign.identity)"
TimestampUrl="http://timestamp.verisign.com/scripts/timestamp.dll" />
It takes quite a while (10 minutes or more) when I have many files. It is possible to run stuff in parallel or in other ways speed it up. (I am trying to sign more than 100 files.. )
Another way of speeding up the signing is to remove the TimeStampUrl parameter. It may not be good enough for release build (to not have a time stamp on the signature), but it is good enough for a development build.
And it speeds up the signing process with 80-90%.
The only way to do parallel build with MsBuild is to have different instances of msbuild, thus different project files, I don't think that's recommended here. You cannot do task or target in parallels, yet you can build project in parallel (but you can create several project files with one target in each). You may have precision here : How to run tasks in parallel in MSBuild .
Moreover, I think you will be limited by your disk access speed and not by your memory.
I don't know the SignFile task enough to give advice on how optimize it, though, sorry.
I have a question related to MSBuild script. My scenario is if build fails, build output should be copied into local system. If build passes, build output goes into a server destination folder.
Can anybody help me out? I am trying this with MSBuild not with Teambuilds.
Thanks
Shanthi
If your build fails then the output will be in an unknown indeterminable state that will be of little use to you, so there is little or no point in copying it to a local location. If the build fails then the final task which copies the output to the network won't be executed, so that problem is taken care of.
If you still want to handle errors and execute certain tasks upon failure, then this page has some good suggestions. Alternatively, you may find the need to write your own task to do specifically what you want (writing tasks is very easy), this link will help you with that.