Community TFS Build Manager – Change Drop Location Preview

A couple of weeks ago I was faced with a sudden replacement of the server hosting the drop file share for a collection hosting 150+ builds. Even though it didn’t’ please some of the builds admins, I remained calm and promised them I could easily change drop locations for all builds with the Community TFS Build Manger. I was quite sure the Build Manager had a feature to batch change the drop location of selected builds.

But I was wrong
Much to my surprise I couldn’t find any way to change the drop location using the Community Build Manager.  I can say I looked for more than a while, as I was quite sure it was possible, but at last I had to surrender to the state that it wasn’t possible using tfs build manager.  Somehow I must have mixed up the feature set with my own hacks or simply assumed it would be included. 

No need to panic  ;)
I knew I had implemeted a similuar feature a long time ago, After a short diging I found what I was looking for. I had implemented a Change Drop Location feature back in 2009 in a tool/hack TfsBuildAdmin and I could probably use it or rewrite it again. It turned out that the 2009 TfsBuildAdmin tool was against the old build API and I had already rewritten the Change Drop Location feature against the new tfs2010 build API. This meant that I had a solution to batch update 150 build drop locations. First problem solved!

A promise is a promise
But I still had a problem; I kind of had promised that the Change Drop Location feature was included in the Community TFS build Manger. And of course it would be best to have such features integrated in a common tool like Build Manager.  So I simply emailed Jakob Ehn and Michael Fourie and described the problem, the solution and offered to assist in developing the feature set.

Build Manager Change Drop Location feature
This is the result so far, then selecting (multiple) builds and right clicking you get a new menu item Change Drop Location. Once selected it presents you a form to select update method. You can do both search and Replace updates and force a standard drop location for all build definitions using a couple of macros such as $(TeamProject)  and $(BuildServer)
You also have an option to update drop locations for existing builds (to ensure that the link in the build reports works for existing or old builds)

 

Preview download available
If you can’t wait until the next release of Tfs Community Build Manager I have put together a preview of the standalone application with the Change Drop Location feature enabled. You can download it from my SkyDrive https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=5d46cae8c0008cf0&resid=5D46CAE8C0008CF0!1052&id=5D46CAE8C0008CF0!1052

Update 2012-06-02 This code is now committed to the main branch for Tfs Build Community extensions and can be downloaded and built using the following changeset http://tfsbuildextensions.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/changes/76886.