R – CruiseControl.NET and TFS Labeller

We've done this and can give you some pointers to start.

2 things you should be aware of:

• MSBuild can generate the necessary deployment files for you.
• MSBuild won't deploy the files to the FTP or UNC share. You'll need a separate step for this.

To use MSBuild to generate the ClickOnce manifests, here's the command you'll need to issue:

msbuild /target:publish /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=AnyCPU; "c:\yourProject.csproj"

That will tell MSBuild to build your project and generate ClickOnce deployment files inside the bin\Release\YourProject.publish directory.

All that's left is to copy those files to the FTP/UNC share/wherever, and you're all set.

You can tell CruiseControl.NET to build using those MSBuild parameters.

You'll then need a CruiseControl.NET build task to take the generated deployment files and copy them to the FTP or UNC share. We use a custom little C# console program for this, but you could just as easily use a Powershell script.

In the 2008 version of TFS, you don't see labels in the standard history of files and folders. If you really want to know why - see Brian Harry's blog post "Why TFS Labels are not like VSS Labels".

To find labels in Visual Studio, go to File, Source Control, Label, Find Label... From that you can see what versions of files were included in that label.

The team have definitely heard that this is not ideal, and the next version of TFS (Team Foundation Server 2010, codenamed "Rosario") will include improvements to the History view to make labels easier to find - see http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7807943 for the spec of improvements to the History view in TFS 2010.

BTW - I actually moved to changeset based build numbering with TFS which makes labelling less necessary. See http://www.woodwardweb.com/vsts/changeset_based.html for more details.

Hope that helps,

Martin.