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Adding Custom Loggers to Team Build

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Most of the magic in a Team Build is done using either (a) customized tasks, or (b) a customized logger.  Well, most of the build machine magic - there's plenty of magic in the client, the Application Tier, and the Data Tier.  All right - even on the build machine I suppose plenty of magic happens within MSBuild itself.  In any case, we should be able to agree that some of the magic in a Team Build happens using customized tasks and loggers, right?  They're responsible for making most of the web service calls that populate the database with information about the build, interacting with source control and work item tracking, keeping track of the errors/warnings encountered during the build, etc.

Yesterday we looked at using tasks to add customized build steps during a build.  Today I'd like to show you how to add a customized logger...  For more information on MSBuild loggers, check out MSBuild Logging on MSDN.

Step 1.  Figure out why you want to add a logger. 

I was thinking about this last night - would a Team Build user ever want to add a custom logger?  The IDC team, implementers of Team Build 1.0, have a couple of posts on different types of custom loggers:

An XML Logger.  This might be useful for diagnostic purposes - it will show you every single event raised by MSBuild during the course of a build.  I wouldn't recommend it for large builds, unless you feel like filling up your hard disk!

An errors/warnings logger that creates log files per solution.   This could be pretty useful if you are running into tons of errors/warnings in your build and want to separate them out into more managable chunks (by default Team Build creates log files per configuration).

Neither of these seemed seemed particularly compelling to me, though - I could see wanting to use them once or twice, but not all the time.  How about this - out of the box TFS supports notifications on build completion or on build quality change.  For certain types of builds, though, one might want to send out notifications on build start.  Right?  Right?  Oh fine, it's not the most interesting thing in the world, but it's something...

If you come up with other interesting reasons to write your own loggers, please let me know!

Step 2.  You'll want to actually write your custom logger. 

I'm not going to post the entire sample this time - just the relevant bit. 

 public class CustomLogger : ILogger
{

     ...

     public void Initialize(IEventSource source)
    {
        source.BuildStarted += new BuildStartedEventHandler(HandleBuildStartedEvent);
    }

    public void HandleBuildStartedEvent(Object sender, BuildStartedEventArgs args)
    {
        // Write fancy email sending code here!
    }

     ...
}

Step 3.  You'll need to tell MSBuild about your logger, using the /logger command-line switch. 

One of the files created for each build type is TfsBuild.rsp.  This is an MSBuild response file, and can contain MSBuild.exe command-line switches.  Team Build will pass this file to MSBuild.exe whenever a build is started (for the given build type). 

So - check out TfsBuild.rsp from source control, add something like the following:

/logger:CustomLogger,CustomLogger.dll

...and check it back in.

Step 4.  Make sure that your logger assembly is available during the build. 

The easiest thing here is probably to add it to the same directory in source control as the TfsBuild.rsp file you just modified - Team Build will then sync CustomLogger.dll along with TfsBuild.proj, TfsBuild.rsp, and WorkspaceMapping.xml.  In this case, you won't need to give a full path to the assembly in the rsp file, and the above example should just work.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 01, 2006
    Buck Hodges on Team Build blogger: Aaron Halberg.

    And speaking of Aaron Halberg, here is his post...
  • Anonymous
    April 25, 2007
    I'm speaking at TechEd 2007 in Orlando this coming June on the whys and hows of customizing TFS. As part
  • Anonymous
    May 01, 2007
    Sharing this information from Jeff Beehler's Blog Aaron’s posts on how to extend team build through custom
  • Anonymous
    April 20, 2008
    And what about TFS 2008? its ILogger interface looks very poor: there's neither BuildStarted event nor BuildStartedEventArgs type... what is supposed to replace those? the only two ILogger members - logEvent and logEventException methods - do not seem to be sufficient.Thank you.
  • Anonymous
    April 29, 2008
    Hi Aaron,have you seen the last question?