Troubleshooting Team Foundation Build Process Issues

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Sometimes the Team Foundation Build process fails for reasons that are not immediately obvious. This section contains information about the diagnostic tools that helps you troubleshoot build process issues.

General Build Process Failures

  • To determine whether your build error is caused by an MSBuild error, or is isolated to Team Foundation Build, try doing a desktop build or a command-line build of the .proj file by using MSBuild.

  • To examine all the errors and warnings, view the errorsandwarnings.txt file in the build drop folder.

  • To examine configuration/platform errors and warnings, view Platformflavor.txt.

  • For all other issues, examine the build.log file.

  • To receive a detailed log file, edit the .rsp file to add /v:diag to record the log file in diagnostic mode.

Build Does Not Start

  • Set the Event Viewer source to Team Foundation Build (Source = TFS Build). This is very useful when the build fails in the initializing phase, and no build log is created. For more information about the Event Viewer see https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=59843 and https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=59842.

  • To enable tracing on the Team Foundation Server, set the“tracewriter” value to "true" in the web.config file (located in <root>:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server\Web Services), and set the "switches" values to 1 for error tracing or 3 for information tracing. This creates a log file in <root>:\Windows\temp\tflogfiles. Examine the log file for build related exceptions.

See Also

Other Resources

Administering Team Foundation Build
Troubleshooting Team Foundation Build
Managing Builds with Team Foundation Build