We are starting to use TFS2013 (we use svn still, but for a number of reasons we're putting new code on TFS).
I have a solution that contains a project with an EF database model and I would like to share it with a different solution (to be more specific: there is a client website solution and a separate one for backend).
On SVN I would have created svn externals - I would be able to share the code easily and if I branched, the shared project would have a nice copy on branch as well. Moreover, both projects would have the most up-to-date version of the db model, which suits me perfectly.
TFS 2013 seems to push be pushing towards NuGets. That means, that if I create a nuget package of the db project:
I will have to update the db projec separately each time there is a db change, release it and then update all projects that use it
If I branch, I'll probably have to create a different nuget package for the branched version and amend the nuget reference on merge
It pollutes the nuget repo with things that are not exactly worth a repository (in case of a DB model, you want to have the latest possible version because a website will probably break if you don't, no point for versioning so that the build doesn't break)
I spent some time trying to find a suitable solution, but the best idea I found is just referencing the project from a different solution - the problem with it is, I would have to make the root folder for the build be higher than just the solution and that would add several more projects that I don't need. Another idea is referencing by branching, which was good for TFS 2010 with multiple projects, but I can't fit it into my scenario (we have a single 'Main' node where we put all solutions).
So, how would you share a DB project on TFS 2013?
Related
We have currently released our code to Production, and as a result have cut and branched to ensure we can support our current release, whilst still supporting hot-fixes without breaking the current release from any on-going development.
Here is our current structure:
Project-
/Development
/RC1
Until recently using Octopus we have had the following process:
Dev->Staging/Dev Test->UAT
Which works fine as we didn't have an actual release.
My question is how can Octopus support our new way of working?
Do we create a new/clone project in Octopus named RC1 and have CI from our RC1 branch into that? Then add/remove as appropriate as this RC's are no longer required?
Or is there another method that we've clearly missed out on?
It seems that most organisations that are striving for continuous something end up with a CI server and continuous deployment up to some manual sign off environment and then require continuous delivery to production. This generally leads to a branching strategy in order to isolate the release candidate to allow hot fixing.
I think a question like this raises more points for discussion, before trying to provide a one size fits all answer IMHO.
The kind of things that spring to mind are:
Do you have "source code" dependencies or binary ones for any shared components.
What level of integration / automated regression testing do you have.
Is your deployment orchestrated by TFS, or driven by a user in Octopus.
Is there a database as part of the application that needs consideration.
How is your application version numbering controlled.
What is your release cycle.
In the past where I've encountered this scenario, I would look towards a code promotion branching strategy which provides you with one branch to maintain in production - This has worked well where continuous deployment to production is not an option. You can find more branching strategies discussed on the ALM Rangers page on CodePlex
Developers / Testers can continually push code / features / bug fixes through staging / uat. At the point of release the Dev branch is merged to Release branch, which causes a release build and creates a nuget package. This should still be released to Octopus in exactly the same way, only it's a brand new release and not a promotion of a previous release. This would need to ensure that there is no clash on version numbering and so a strategy might be to have a difference in the major number - This would depend on your current setup. This does however, take an opinionated view that the deployment is orchestrated by the build server rather than Octopus Deploy. Primarily TeamCity / TFS calls out to the Ocotpus API, rather than a user choosing the build number in Octopus (we have been known to make mistakes)
ocoto.exe create-release --version GENERATED_BY_BUILD_SERVER
To me, the biggest question I ask clients is "What's the constraint that means you can't continuously deploy to production". Address that constraint (see theory of constraints) and you remove the need to work round an issue that needn't be there in the first place (not always that straight forward I know)
I would strongly advise that you don't clone projects in Octopus for different environments as it's counter intuitive. At the end of the day you're just telling Octopus to go and get this nuget package version for this app, and deploy it to this environment please. If you want to get the package from a different NuGet feed for release, then you could always make use of the custom binding on the NuGet field in Octopus and drive that by a scoped variable depending on the environment you're deploying to.
Step 1 - Setup two feeds
Step 2 - Scope some variables for those feeds
Step 3 - Consume the feed using a custom expression
I hope this helps
This is unfortunately something Octopus doesn't directly have - true support for branching (yet). It's on their roadmap for 3.1 under better branching support. They have been talking about this problem for some time now.
One idea that you mentioned would be to clone your project for each branch. You can do this under the "Settings" tab (on the right-hand side) in your project that you want to clone. This will allow you to duplicate your project and simply rename it to one of your branches - so one PreRelease or Release Candidate project and other is your mainline Dev (I would keep the same name of the project). I'm assuming you have everything in the same project group.
Alternatively you could just change your NuSpec files in your projects in different branches so that you could clearly see what's being deployed at the overview project page or on the dashboard. So for your RC branch, you could just add the suffix -release within the NuSpec in your RC branch which is legal (rules on Semantic Versioning talk about prereleases at rule #9). This way, you can use the same project but have different packages to deploy. If your targeted servers are the same, then this may be the "lighter" or simpler approach compared to cloning.
I blogged about how we do this here:
http://www.alexjamesbrown.com/blog/development/working-branch-deployments-tfs-octopus/
It's a bit of a hack, but in summary:
Create branch in TFS Create branch specific build definition
Create branch specific drop location for Octopack
Create branch specific Octopus Deployment Project (by cloning your ‘main’ deployment
Edit the newly cloned deployment, re-point the nuget feed location to your
branch specific output location, created in step 3
I have been working with a TFS project that supports copying build output to source control. If I open the build definition, this is under "Build Defaults". There is an option to copy build output to a source control folder.
I have just installed TFS Server 2013 (with update 2) and I want to use this feature with a new Team Project. However, if I create new build in VS 2012 or VS 2013 on the new server, I am not given the option to copy build output to source control. What gives?
I am not looking for a workaround, I want to know what to change so that my server acts like the first one I described. Thanks!
Screenshots of what I'm talking about: http://imgur.com/a/mhDNQ
This was a feature that was temporarily present in TFS, but I believe has since been removed. If I recall it was put in there specifically to support the cloud-hosted elastic build servers which didn't have access to network shares to drop the builds in.
Most people recommend against putting your build outputs into TFS. The best approach is to publish them to a NuGet feed.
In any case if you want to put your build outputs into TFS (or a NuGet feed) you'll have to modify the build workflow to do that yourself.
Open a new build definition > process.
Under template select new and you should be able to choose project and folder. Find your original template and link it. Your option should appear.
In TFS 2013 this has changed to be "store drops in TFS". When you select this option the drop I'd stored in a new inversioned store that you can access.
While you can easily get the files out as indecision or zips the built in tools like release management do not support it yet. I would recommend that you use this option but publish your assets to a nugget repository.
If your TFS is available online (VSO or https) then you can use MyGet to dynamically load the nugget packages that you are publish and make them available on a feed.
http://docs.myget.org/docs/how-to/use-tfs-online-git-with-myget-build-services
I am involved in some TFS setup at my new job and one of my tasks is to setup the location of the common framework assemblies in TFS so that the other projects can reference them. The only way I can think of is to branch the assemblies from the framework folder into all of the other projects. The issue with this is that anytime I want to update all of the projects with the new assemblies I need to merge each branch one at a time. Is there not a way to merge all at once?
I mentioned that we should use NuGet but that would rely on the developer doing a get on the new version, they want to push it to the project to ensure that it is being used...
Any advice would be much appreciated!
NuGet is the right way to do it. Make your Framework build publish your NuGet package to a local NuGet Server from where is it is referenced by everyone. This way, when you upgrade framework, everyone will get it and you don't have to push it.
After doing lots of looking around I believe the answer to the problem is here in these two articles:
http://geekswithblogs.net/jakob/archive/2009/03/05/implementing-dependency-replication-with-tfs-team-build.aspx
http://geekswithblogs.net/jakob/archive/2010/12/08/dependency-replication-with-tfs-2010-build.aspx
I'll need to adapt some of the ideas within to TFS 2012.
Okay, I have a couple inquiries:
1 - Let's say I have a solution that references several external projects. I want to reference specific Labels (that represent stable versions) on those external projects. I know that you can do this by doing a Get Specific Version by Label on those projects. But once you've done that, is there a convenient way to do a Get on the whole solution, and have it preserve all of the specific versions?
Ultimately, I would like to do a single Get and have it get latest where that is applicable and get specific versions where that is applicable. It seems frustrating to have to do separate Gets on all the projects.
2 - Is it possible to build binaries from labels? When an external project is a stable version that isn't going to change, it makes sense to just reference the binary. When you create a label and build it, does it generate binaries in a specific location for that label that can be referenced?
On your first question: While TFS allows you to grab sources by Label, there is no way to setup a a workspace configuration that is bound to a specific Label or Changeset for a specific path. The only thing I can think of would be to create a batch file which fetches the latest version:
tf get $/Project/Sources /Version:T /recusive
tf get $/Project/ComponentA /version:LMyLabelName1 /recursive
tf get $/Project/ComponentB /version:LMyLabelName2 /recursive
The way forward to do this is to publish your external references to a NuGet repository (can be your own) and then configure NuGet to get a specific version. A CI build can publish a new version to your NuGet server. And you can setup your own server so that you don't need to publish all your binaries to a public server.
On your second question: yes you can build by label in the Queue Build screen you can setup the version to build which will be built:
You can specify a Changeset number (C######), Label (LLabelname) etc. Any version spec will do (see the commandline docs for a explanation on version specs).
By default, no easy referencable name is generated if you build by label. I suspect that some clever build customization will allow you to drop the build output in a predefined folder based on the label name, but there is no such out-of-the-box functionality.
I want to copy an entire TFS project to another project, e.g. MyProj to MyProjSev. Then I want to rollback MyProjSev to a changeset that corresponds to when the client stopped paying. Then I will make MyProjSev available, including the history of the source files, to the client for a period of time as part of the severance agreement. The access/security aspect I know. I can easily make a branch, but if the client views the branch from a TFS Explorer Client, then the history is not available. There are a couple of approaches that involve cloning the entire collection, and lacking an answer to this question here, I will use one of them.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/4918289/553593 [TFS admin detach the collection, back up SQL Server database, TFS admin attach collection, SQL Server restore database to new database name, then TFS admin attach the restored collection]
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee349263(v=vs.100).aspx [Collection command with /clone]
New Information http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/eb77e739-c98c-4e36-9ead-fa115b27fefe TFS Integration Tools was what finally worked for me. This 2012 release is a very nice product. It was easy to do a TFS to TFS transfer from my MyProj to the new MyProjSev that I created for client to access. Upon completion I simply did some rollbacks and set the security in the new project. It would have been easier if in TFS 2010 one can rename projects (can do in TFS 2012) Neither the TFSConfig Collection /clone nor the procedure described in MS Docs for Splitting a Team Projects Collection will work for this task. The issue is that even though one ends up with two collections, their projects have the same names, and that is not allowed (and in TFS 2010 you cannot rename projects).
The best option is to clone the collection as you suggested.
I answer my own question as described in New Information above in the text of the question. Note all this is specific to TFS 2010.