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Upgrading from XAML to Build 2015 with minimal changes

16 Feb, 2016
This series is currently a work in progress

XAML builds on Visual Studio Team Services will be deprecated in September 2016. While support for XAML builds seems to stay around on-premise for a little while longer, it’s time to upgrade to Build 2015.

You may have invested quite a bit in the XAML build system in the past, but as long as your changes have been mostly limited to custom MsBuild tasks and targets, Powershell or batch scripts, then upgrading to Build 2015 is (almost) a piece of cake.

In this series I’ll go through the basic settings in the XAML Default Template and I’ll explain how to transfer each setting over to the new system. There are still a few things which are not possible in the new system, such as configuring Gated Checkins for TFVC, but almost every other setting can be converted over.

Before going over each setting, I’ll assume that you’ve installed at least one build agent, or are using Visual Studio Team Services with the Hosted Build option.

Other tips and tricks

Jesse is a passionate trainer and coach, helping teams improve their productivity and quality all the while trying to keep work fun. He is a Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) through Scrum.org for the Professional Scrum Foundations (PSF), Professional Scrum Master (PSM) and Developer (PSD .NET) programs. With a strong background in the .NET platform and C#, Jesse is able to translate the needs of development teams when it comes to tools to manage work, build the code and keep quality up. He has contributed to a number of open source products that extend – as well as supported commercial tools like NDepend in their integration into – Team Foundation Server. Jesse regularly blogs and contributes to numerous communities on StackExchange and MSDN networks, he has received the Microsoft Community Contributor Award three years in a row and has been recently been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional award. He’s spoken at conferences and user groups, including the Microsoft TechDays and the Scrum Day Europe. Trainer certifications: Professional Scrum Foundations Professional Scrum Master Professional Scrum Developer (.NET) Scaled Professional Scrum (SPS) Scaled Agile Program Consultant In past years Jesse has delivered ALM, Test Automation and Scrum training all over the world, most recently in Sydney, Milan and Bangalore. He has redelivered materials from industry leading partners as well as developed his own. In addition to the previously mentioned subjects Jesse has taught courses on Visual Studio, Object Oriented Analysis and Design, Design Patterns for C# developers, Unified Modelling languages and Regular Expressions. Jesse is married with Charlotte, recently became father of his first daughter and lives in a house that’s more than a century old in the beautiful city of Utrecht. He loves espresso and dark chocolate, travels a lot and takes photos everywhere he goes.

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