I'm looking to create a deployment artifact using TFS Build Server 2015. I have my web application building, and it looks like everything I need is in the /bin folder, but it's not applying the transforms that are normally applied if I go into Visual Studio and Publish the website.
How do I get the build to use the transforms defined?
It's hard to say without knowing more about your release process, and what output you're expecting. I'm assuming that you're not using /t:Package to build a web deploy package here.
The web.config transforms normally are only applied during the process of publishing the project. In order to force the transformation behaviour, I believe you can specify the following arguments in your call to msbuild.
/p:UseWPP_CopyWebApplication=true;PipelineDependsOnBuild=false
If you do want to publish, you'll want to run:
msbuild your.sln /p:DeployOnBuild=true;PublishProfile=yourpublishprofilename