Customize your build process

If the build process capabilities of the default template do not meet your team's needs, you can customize your build process.

Run a script in your build process Before you resort to the powerful (but also complicated and expensive) approach of creating a custom build process, you might find that you can meet your team’s needs by running and passing data to MSBuild or external programs or scripts. You can also write your own script and run it in your build process.

Customize your build process template If you need your build process to do more than what the default template can do, you can customize the template to follow your own Windows Workflow Foundation instructions. Your instructions can run .NET Framework code that is implemented in CodeActivity objects. You can run activities that are built into Team Foundation Build (TFBuild), offered by third parties, or built by you.

Use and develop custom build process activities If the activities that are built into Team Foundation Build (TFBuild) do not meet your needs, you can use activities from third parties, or if necessary, develop your own.

Team Foundation Build environment variables You can get key bits of data that you need for your build process logic. For example, you can get path to the source folder or the path to the folder that contains the outputs you want to drop.

Team Foundation Build activities An alphabetical and task-based reference of some of the built-in TFBuild activities.