Whats new with Team Build and of course who am I !!!!!!!!!

Beta 3 is round the corner and will soon be out of the door and definitely this is a good time for me to start my own blog – vooooooohhhooo!!! I am Khushboo Sharan and am a Program Manager at Microsoft working for the past year and a half on Visual Studio Team Foundation (the server component of Visual Studio Team System). I am not 'brand' new to the blog world and some of you would have read my initial blog on Team Foundation team blogs. Well – Ok, so what if I just wrote a few blogs and then kind of disappeared J! On all this and more later but today let me tell you what excites me the mooooooosst today –

Yup – with beta 3, out goes a bunch of new features and improvements in Team Build – never heard of Team Build? Do it rightaway !! Yes, this is a build automation tool being shipped with team foundation and does a bunch of things to automate your build process.

For those you have already tried out Team build and have given feedback, loved the product, hated it, got stuck with it – thanks a ton!!! Based on whatever we heard from you, we have done loads of changes to TB.

So here’s a list of whats new with beta3 on Team Build. Detailed descriptions for all these will follow. However here is a sneak peak –

- A brand new command line tool

This was definitely one of the top common asks in beta 2. Has commands for common operations like starting a build, deleting a build and aborting a build in progress(the last 2 being recent additions to the feature set of Team build). Check out tfsbuild.exe for getting your hands dirty.

- Improved detailed report UI

Much improved look and feel and yes not to forget a complete new ‘Build steps’ section which steps through each build step (live!!!) as the build happens

- Test Integration

This was kind of busted in beta 2 and you had to apply some tricks and tips to get this working. Moreover we did not have support for running all kinds of test. However with beta3 its all done up for you – you can run unit tests, load tests, webtests, ordered, generic tests as a part of your build process easily

- New webmethods

Earlier we had ‘get’ methods which would help you read data from our database and create say custom reports of your own. Well, we have done a bunch of things to polish these and other webmethods and have documentation support. Also, we have added a bunch of ‘set’ methods to help you write data into our database. So if you want to use your own build system (come on – give Team build a shot!!) you can still use that – push your data into our store and get the benefit of the build reports that we generate.

There is all this and much more that we have done in beta 3 with our product. Try it out as soon as beta 3 is out !! Let us know what do you think !!