What's New in Team Foundation Build

When you install or upgrade to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012, you and your team can benefit from new features.

Define a build process

Increase the efficiency of your gated check-in build process by configuring it to build multiple check-ins at the same time. See Define a Gated Check-In Build Process to Validate Changes.
Use the new Visual Studio Test Runner (or the RunTests activity in a custom build process) to run native unit tests, third-party framework unit tests, and other kinds of tests that cannot be run by MSTest. See Run Tests in Your Build Process.
Some new build process activities are available. See Team Foundation Build Activities.
You can debug your build process more easily. For example, you can choose a link on the build results window to view diagnostic logs.
When you use Visual Studio 2012.1 to create your build process and then run it using the Hosted Build Controller, you can drop the outputs into your Team Foundation Service server. See Select a Staging Location and Set Up a Drop Folder.

In the new Builds page in Team Explorer:
- Create, modify, and delete build definitions.
- See and manage all builds triggered by you.
- Use My Favorite Build Definitions to organize and then easily access and get information about the builds that matter most to you.
See Run, Monitor, and Manage Builds.
You can pause a build definition to allow new builds to be queued and set to a paused state until you re-enable the build definition or manually start one of the queued builds. See Create a Build Definition.
You can retry a completed build definition, which queues a new build using the same options you specified for the completed build. See Queue a Build.

Connect your Team Foundation Service to:
- A Team Foundation Service build controller. See Use the Hosted Build Controller in a team project collection hosted on Team Foundation Service.
- Your on-premises build controller