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Visual Studio Team Foundation Services Update: Archiving, Jenkins Support
Sprint 102 adds two new build tasks, one for archiving files on various platforms, and another for queuing up Jenkins jobs.
- By Michael Domingo
- 07/28/2016
The Visual Studio Team Services group earlier this month released a few new build features in its more recent sprint of VSTS, one that allows for archiving files and another for queuing up Jenkins jobs.
Archiving files is no longer a manual process, and is now integrated with a new Archive Files build task. "Use it to easily create archives during your Team Foundation Server (TFS) or Team Services continuous integration (CI) build process," writes Jason Sholl, a senior software engineer with Visual Studio Team Services, in a blog post.
The Archive Files task can archive to 7z, zip, wim, tar, tar.gz, tar.bz2, and tar.xz files, but there's potential for other archiving formats to be supported. "The build task is open sourced, so feel free to use it to create your own build extensions," writes Sholl.
An alternative to the Microsoft Build Tools, Jenkins is an open source, server-based continuous integration tool that's written in Java and can run as a Windows service. VSTS Sprint 102 integrates Jenkins into a new build task called the Jenkins Queue Job, which can be used to monitor and queue up jobs when it's added as a build step.
Visual Studio Team Services is available here.
About the Author
Michael Domingo is a long-time software publishing veteran, having started up and managed several developer publications for the Clipper compiler, Microsoft Access, and Visual Basic. He's also managed IT pubs for 1105 Media, including Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine and Virtualization Review before landing his current gig as Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief. Besides his publishing life, he's a professional photographer, whose work can be found by Googling domingophoto.