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xamltfsbuildvisual-studio-extensions

Migrate custom XAML build workflow to TFS 2017 extensions

I currently have a custom XAML build workflow which performs a lot of validations based on code structure, folders, file content and even database configuration.

Currently we need to consider to migrate it to TFS 2017, and I'm trying to understand the possibilities, effort and pitfalls and this is where I could use your help.

I have logic built in C# and then I look at MSDN documentation the language seems to be Javascript, GitHub samples seem to be Typescript. Am I forced to use one of this languages? any preferred one or limitations that I should be aware of? Can for instance, I connect to a database directly? or it's better to have an API and just use REST calls?

Can I for instance, use .Net object which have already some wrapped logic?

I also noticed that on the manifest file I can declare inputs, but can I somehow use outputs? For example, I have a task that does validation and in the end I would have a task to send an e-mail with the result of that validation. Is this possible?

Thank you in advance.

Solution

  • You are right in concluding that XAML builds are deprecated. The new Task based system is much more flexible and now that we even have YAML support, you can move to Builds as Code.

    The reason you're seeing Build Tasks in TypeScript (which is a superset of JavaScript) because of the cross platform nature of NodeJS. This allows your tasks to run on Windows, Linux and Mac. In the mean time we also got .NET Core support. You can also use PowerShell if that's more of your liking.

    Regarding your 'can I connect to a database' question. Yes you can, if you want it is another question. This will massively slow your build down and will make your build fail if there are issues with database connectivity. I would suggest asking a second question here on Stackoverflow to describe your situation and discuss if there is a better alternative.

    You can use output variables from your task and reuse these in the next tasks. That's all supported and no problem (see https://roadtoalm.com/2016/08/11/set-output-variable-in-a-powershell-vsts-build-task/ for an example).