Create a Custom "Builds" List on Your TFS Project Portal (a.k.a. SharePoint Team Site)
One of "tweaks" that I commonly make to the SharePoint team site created for each project in Team Foundation Server is to create a custom list to track the important builds for the project (typically corresponding to each milestone or iteration).
There's really nothing special about the list. It's just a custom list (named Builds) that appears in the Quick Launch navigation and has two columns on the default view:
- Title (Single line of text, default column)
- Version (Single line of text)
I use the default Title field to specify the milestone or iteration (e.g. Sprint-1, Sprint-2, etc.) and the custom Version field to specify the assembly version of the build (technically the Assembly File Version).
Shortly before or after a release to the Production environment (i.e. whenever the build number of the release is known), I add a new item to the list. If the build number changes (for example, because of a QFE/hotfix), I update the version on the existing list item. [Note that if you want to view the history of a particular item in the list to see who changed what and when the change was made, you can enable Item Version History on the list. Simply click Settings --> List Settings, and then in the General Settings section, click Versioning settings.]
For example, here are the contents of the list for my current project:
| Title | Version |
|---|---|
| Sprint-1 | 1.0.7.0 |
| Sprint-2 | 1.0.41.0 |
| Sprint-3 | 1.0.51.3 |
| Sprint-4 | 1.0.81.0 |
| Sprint-5 | 1.0.116.0 |
| Sprint-6 | 1.0.168.0 |
| Sprint-7 | 1.0.237.0 |
| Sprint-8 | 1.0.270.0 |
| Sprint-9 | 1.0.295.5 |
This list makes it very easy for anyone with access to the team site to determine which build was associated with a particular release.
I suppose that I could spend a few seconds renaming the Title column to something like Milestone or Iteration, but honestly I don't bother (at least not anymore).