Answers to Orcas Team Build and Folder Diff questions from the DNUG meeting
Ok, so at the Dallas .NET Users Group last night, some questions were asked about Orcas that I didn't have answers to - I know, what a shock! Sometimes I miss the good old days of VSTS 2005, where all the good questions had been asked and I knew pretty much all the answers before someone even finished asking the question... now I get to be clueless again... I didn't even let people ask Rosario questions, I'd already told them all that I know (didn't take long), and getting answers out of MS on Rosario is a bit dodgy right now. Oh, and for those of you that aren't even using VSTS 2005, goodness, get out of the stone ages! Have you even gotten a wheel yet?!? It won't be long and VSTS 2005 will be OLD V1 stuff.
Anyway, the main question was about Team Build, so I turned to Buck Hodges and got a bit of help. The main question was if I have a stack of builds in the build queue, what version of the code is retrieved when the build finally gets run. Here's what Buck said:
"When the server detects a checkin that affects a build definition for which 'build each check-in' is enabled, it records the changeset number in the build queue. When the build occurs, that changeset is passed to the build (what literally happens is that the build process requests the build request information from the server, and that’s part of the build request information). If you are using CI with 'accumulate check-ins,' it also records the version to build in the build queue, but it’s based on the time the build gets queued."
That sounded a bit like magic, and I don't trust magic with my software process, so I opened up my TeamFoundation.Build.targets file to see how this worked and found the following:
<!-- The VersionSpec to be used by the Get task -->
<GetVersion Condition=" '$(GetVersion)'=='' ">$(SourceGetVersion)</GetVersion>
I assume that is the value Buck is saying that gets passed in. I didn't dig any further.
The second question that came up was whether folder diff happens on the server or on the client. That was a simpler question. Buck said: "Folder diff is computed on the client." I dug a little deeper, as that seemed like it wouldn't perform well, so Tan Phan (that's a fun name to say!) explained further: "If for comparing two folders on the server, folder diff downloads the folders/files list and compares the MD5 hashes. File contents are not downloaded unless you decide to actually view the diffs of the contents."
Needless to say, I'm happy with both implementations, it seems well thought out.