How can I get TFS 2010 to build each project to a separate directory?

Question

In our project, we'd like to have our TFS build put each project into its own folder under the drop folder, instead of dropping all of the files into one flat structure. To illustrate, we'd like to see something like this:

DropFolder/
  Foo/
    foo.exe
  Bar/
    bar.dll
  Baz
    baz.dll

This is basically the same question as was asked here, but now that we're using workflow-based builds, those solutions don't seem to work. The solution using the CustomizableOutDir property looked like it would work best for us, but I can't get that property to be recognized. I customized our workflow to pass it in to MSBuild as a command line argument (/p:CustomizableOutDir=true), but it seems MSBuild just ignores it and puts the output into the OutDir given by the workflow.

I looked at the build logs, and I can see that the CustomizableOutDir and OutDir properties are both getting set in the command line args to MSBuild. I still need OutDir to be passed in so that I can copy my files to TeamBuildOutDir at the end.

Any idea why my CustomizableOutDir parameter isn't getting recognized, or if there's a better way to achieve this?

Answer 1

I figured out a nice way to do it. It turns out that since you can set the OutDir to whatever you want within the workflow, if you set it to the empty string, MSBuild will instead use the project-specific OutputPath. That lets us be a lot more flexible. Here's my entire solution (based on the default build workflow):

In the Run MSBuild task, set OutDir to the empty string. In that same task, set your CommandLineArguments to something like the following. This will allow you to have a reference to the TFS default OutDir from your project:

String.Format("/p:CommonOutputPath=""{0}\\""", outputDirectory)

In each project you want copied to the drop folder, set the OutputPath like so:

<PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Release|AnyCPU' ">
    <OutputPath Condition=" '$(CommonOutputPath)'=='' ">bin\Release\</OutputPath>
    <OutputPath Condition=" '$(CommonOutputPath)'!='' ">$(CommonOutputPath)YourProjectName\bin\Release\</OutputPath>
</PropertyGroup>

Check everything in, and you should have a working build that deploys each of your projects to its own folder under the drop folder.