The last couple of weeks have seen me delve deep into the now called Microsoft Azure(renamed from Windows Azure) to perform various tasks. In the next couple of posts I will be sharing my experience in there however today I wish to talk about creating build agents in TFS. This is a highly theoretical approach but can be available if required to offer a practical approach.
Most organizations use the hosted TFS and it works fine only up to the point where one wants to major customizations such as dealing with deployments and lab management. For instance when one want to automatic builds, TFs only offers the hosted build controller which can be prohibitive since the drop folders have to be manually downloaded. This means that any form of automation becomes tricky.
This is the first motivation to installing an on Premise TFS version and the configure additional build controllers and their associated build agents.
Below I will provide a list of facts that one needs to know when the want to create an on-premise TFS instance and link it to the hosted one.
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TFS instances can either be hosted or on-premise(I bet you knew this already).
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The hosted instance supports only one build controller and in turn one build agent.
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There are some massive security considerations when it comes to using the on-premise TFS as a result of the point below.
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On premise TFS instance can be linked to a hosted TFS in order to provide more functionality.
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In order to link on premise and hosted TFS instances, the user needs to have the permissions “Edit projection collection configuration” which are held by users in the group “Project Collection administrators”. Note that these permissions need to be set at the hosted TFS instance.
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You cannot add a build agent from an on-premise TFS to a controller on a hosted TFS. What this means is, in order to gain the benefits of the on premise TFS one needs to create a build controller first and then build attached build agents. Then the build controller needs to be started in an interactive mode.
Below is a link on msdn which details the process of creating a build agent.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb399135.aspx