One of the problems I have noticed with Team Build adoption is that there were no good books covering Team Build is practical detail. The MSDN documentation is not adequate. Early adopters really relied mainly on Buck Hodges and Aaron Hallberg's blogs (and more recently Jim Lamb's). You could find a chapter or two in books covering TFS or VSTS, but not enough practical information to enable you to jump in and start using Team Build in real world scenarios and integrate it into your company's or project's development process.
In fact, this lack of resources on Team Build also resulted in a lack of good tools leveraging Team Build 2008's capabilities that have not been exposed out of the box. This actually was what prompted me to release the Buddy Build tool on CodePlex ([...]) to help fill in one of those gaps, in particular the one related to buddy builds and gated checkins, prior to their appearance as first class citizens in TFS and Team Build 2010.
The first good contribution from a publication came with Jamil Azher's Team Foundation Server 2008 In Action, a relatively good book on TFS 2008. However, its coverage of Team Build left a lot to be desired. Then came this book.
I met William back in September 2008, through email when I was looking for a TFS MVP to co-own my Buddy Build project prior to releasing it on CodePlex (I met him also in person while he was in Redmond for the MVP Summit 2009). Back then, the Buddy Build tool was only an internal project used by a couple of groups at Microsoft. William was gracious and generous enough to accept to be a co-owner and dedicate some time to help release the project as open source to the community so that many more folks are leveraging and extending it. When William mentioned that he was working on a book on Team Build, I was anxious to see the result of that. And I have to say it was certainly much better than I expected. Now I can finally recommend a good book on Team Build 2008 when I am asked, rather than pointing folks to Buck's and Aaron's blogs and the MSDN documentation.
If you are someone new to Team Build 2008, or someone tasked to extend their development and build process and leverage Team Build 2008, then this book will help get you started in a well-paced way. Team Build's functionality in 2008 is based on MSBuild and most of that functionality is spread out between Team Build's core MSBuild script and the library of MSBuild tasks that the Team Build team has written. So, this book's focus on making sure that MSBuild is explained to the tiniest details is a big win. The explanation and coverage of MSBuild is something you will not find in any other book (or even MSDN). The cookbook recipes are also a good collection of reusable and practical code samples that you can reuse in your own applications. And most importantly, they are explained in detail! MSBuild is critically important to Team Build 2008, and it will continue to be so in Team Build 2010, even with Windows Workflow (WF) defining the core build process. The project/solution build process is still going to be MSBuild-centric. Also, the Team Build coverage in this book is unparalleled. This is the definitive guide on Team Build 2008. I was particularly impressed with the Team Build Cookbook chapter, especially the load balancing discussion of the tool that William wrote, as this is a topic I am very interested in and have had solutions addressing it in the Buddy Build tool. It is great to see a book that covers a product so well without presenting a rehash of the product documentation.
William and Sayed have also done a great job of pointing out the MSBuild features that are new to v 3.5 (see appendix A of the book) as a lot of people still don't leverage those so well. Also great was appendix C which describes some of the new features coming out in TFS/TB 2010, based on the CTP version. This is probably a good segway to William and Sayed's potential next book that would cover Team Build 2010 and the WF-based build process (hint, hint).
This book is well worth every penny you spend on it. I enjoyed it a lot, and I even learned from it. I also know other here at Microsoft that use it as an important guide. That's why I now highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding and leveraging Team Build, and I also link to its Amazon page from codeplex.com/BuddyBuild. There is currently no book that comes even close to covering the topic in such detail and with such immediate practical impact. It delivers the best bang for your buck, easily. Quite frankly, I never imagined that such a book will actually come from someone outside of the Raleigh-based Team Build team.
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Follow the authors
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.
There is a newer edition of this item:
Inside the Microsoft Build Engine: Using MSBuild and Team Foundation Build (Developer Reference)
$3.29
(27)
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
$3.29
(27)
Only 1 left in stock - order soon.
