Define your build process

After you set up your build system, you are almost ready to start to use Team Foundation Build to compile your code, run your tests, and perform many other important functions. The next step is to develop a build process, which contains your instructions about which code projects to compile, what actions trigger a build, what tests to run, and any other procedures required by your team.

What do you want to do?

• Create and work with a build definition. You can quickly define a simple but powerful build process that includes your instructions about which code projects to compile, what actions trigger the build, what tests to run, and many other options.

  • Create or edit a build definition

  • Use the Default Template for your build process

  • Build and test a Windows Store app using Team Foundation Build

• Define a build process to support continuous integration. Your team can minimize errors in its codebase by integrating various features into a shared repository as frequently as possible and then building and testing the result. You can implement this strategy, known as continuous integration, by defining a build process that ensures that you and your team can determine as quickly as possible that a check-in from a feature team has broken the build or caused a test to fail.

• Keep your team from "breaking the build." When a developer checks in changes that break the build, the result can be a significant hassle for small teams. The cost to larger teams can be expensive as measured by lost productivity and schedule delays. You can create a gated check-in build definition to guard some or all of your code base against this problem.

• Create customized build processes. By using the Default Template, you can create a build process that meets a broad set of the most common requirements. However, many teams require their build processes to perform specialized tasks or follow customized logic.

• Continue using legacy build processes. When you upgrade from earlier versions of Team Foundation Server, you can continue to use legacy build processes. You can also continue to use older versions of Visual Studio to create build processes on Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2013.