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Introduction

The primary reason I built these, is to help clients migrate from customized XAML builds to the new build system with minimal impact. I'd rather have them fix their mistakes in the new system, than delay their move by fixing it in the XAML workflows.

The secondary reason I built these, is to provide ways to schedule changes to sources automatically. You may have a manual build trigger which updates all the version numbers and checks in the changed files, which in turn triggers a CI build to build the code. By using this two-stage approach, your build and symbols will be associated with the correct changeset and you won't have the issues described before.

So, please take note:

I do not think it's a good idea to change your sources as part of a build.
Unless that's the only thing your build definition does.
In these cases it should not build your sources and produce your shipping artifacts.

A little more background information

The reason why I'm reluctant, is that changing your sources during the build has impact on other features of the Visual Studio Team Services platform.

• As your code is being built, certain artifacts are generated, such as your debug symbols, test results, code coverage etc. And these artifacts are associated with the Changeset number of the build. This may break or cause problems with
• Remote Debugging,
• Source Server support,
• Intellitrace
• and Test Impact Analysis among other features.
• Since your scripts change files, features such as Incremental builds won't work. They'll always have to rebuild the projects, since there are always modified files. This is especially so when you use tasks to patch the AssemblyVersion attribute. This will slow down your builds and which in turn slows down the feedback cycle.

So, now I hope you understand this is a bad idea and you may wonder why I chose to build these tasks anyway.

Install the TFVC tasks to you account or TFS 2015 update 2

You can find the latest stable version of the VSTS Extension tasks on the Visual Studio Marketplace.

Install the TFVC tasks to TFS 2015 RTM or Update 1

Follow these steps to install the TFVC tasks on your TFS server.

Currently supported operations

• Add
• Edit
• Delete
• Check-in
• Undo