User guide

2.13.2 Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2013

When using Visual Studio 2010, Visual Studio 2012, or Visual Studio 2013, release management provides its own

template (select the proper version of the Build template corresponding to your TFS Version). This build template

contains the logic needed to trigger a Release from a build.

This template also contains the logic to tokenize your configuration files. This logic assumes that in your solution,

you have two versions of your configuration files. One version is your normal configuration file used during local

development, and the other is a corresponding file that has the same content, except that instead of having local

values for your variables, tokens have been put there. The build activity will swap those two files before doing the

build, so that we end up with the tokenized version of the configuration files in the drop location.

Here is an example of how to achieve this: For example, if your solution contains a file called web.config, then you

will need to copy that file (and keep them in sync), and name it web.config.token. Your web.config file will stay the

way it is now (and that is what is going to be used when you run the app locally). The web.config.token will contain

tokens instead of values.

So, as an example, let’s say you have in your web.config this line:

Then, you would have this line in your web.config.token:

2.14 Include Release Management Custom Build Logic into a Build Template

To be able to provide some of its functionality, release management provides a TFS Build Template with additional

logic. If you currently use the DefaultTemplate provided by TFS, you can simply replace it with the

ReleaseDefaultTemplate and you will be up and running. However, if you have modified the DefaultTemplate to

add your own logic, you will need to merge the build logic to yours.

Note that this is only needed if you want to take advantage of one of the following features:

 Automatically trigger releases from a build

 Use the file swapping technique to get tokenized file in the drop location

Here is a step by step procedure to get the logic into your Build Template.

2.14.1 Add arguments to custom Build Template

Open ReleaseDefaultTemplate.xaml (TFS 2010) - or ReleaseDefaultTemplate.11.1.xaml (TFS 2012 & TFS 2013).

Those files can be found on a computer where release management components have been installed at this default

location: C:\Program Files (x86)\ Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\ReleaseManagement\bin. Find the last 3 arguments

and add them to your customized Build Template:

*** If you are using the DefaultTemplate.xaml from TFS 2012, you need to add a "DropBuild" argument. In TFS

2010, the "DropBuild" argument already exists in the arguments list.