At work we run TFS2010 with build controllers, build agents and lab management. I have customised the build workflow so that we can get a lot more functionality out of the automated build process. Some of these customisations are things like:

• Finding the product version number
• Incrementing the product version number
• Updating the build name with the new product version
• Updating files prior to compilation
• Updating files after compilation
• Building Sandcastle documentation
• Deploying MSIs to remove servers
• Filtering drop folder output (no source, just build output like configuration files, documentation and MSIs)

I use Codeplex at home for my personal projects. This means that I don’t get all the goodness that comes with TFSBuild in 2010. I still want the automatic version management functionality listed above however. I have the following functionality requirements to make this happen:

• Determine the current product version number
• Increment the product version number
  • Must be done prior to any project compilation
• Sync Wix project versioning with product version number
  • Needs to happen before wix project compilation
  • Needs to cater for wix variables being used for version information
• Allow TFS checkout for files under source control
  • This is important so that incremented version numbers continue to increment from previous version under source control
  • Must also cater for when solution is loaded without TFS availability (broken source control bindings etc)
• Push product/wix version into wix output name
• Failure to execute these actions successful will fail the solution/project build
• No installation required

• No configuration required

  • All customisation of tasks is done using command line arguments

• Extensible using MEF

  • Again, no configuration required to add new tasks

The next post will outline how I was able to make this happen using an extensible MEF task based application.