TFS with different binaries folder for different projects

Question

Hi,

I've got a solution with Silverlight projects, a couple Web applications and some Windows service and their small Winforms test applications.

When I build it using TFS it puts all binary files in the Binaries folder. It also creates a _PublishedWebsites folder where it puts the web applications ready for deployment.

What I would like is for a few of the projects to have their ouput in a separate directory in the Binaries folder. I want the files that I would normally find in the bin\Release folder to be there.

I looked long and hard and could only find scarce documentation on how to achieve that and only for TFS 2008. There's a good article there link text and another entry for VS 2010 there link text. However, none of these work :-(

It seems that the build ignores the <OutputPath> property. I tried fiddling with the <AfterBuild> property but unfortunately if I use the $(OutDir) property I get ALL the files in the Binaries directory and not only the ones that just got compiled.

At the moment I'm setting up a separate build that only has the projects I'm interested in that get compiled but I would really like to have all the files needed for the release built all at once.

EDIT: I didn't make it clear enough but I'm using the latest version of TFS (TFS 2010 RTM). I set up <OutputPathDir> on the project level as explained in the links that I provided.

Cheers.

Answer 1

In your build definition (.proj) file, check that

<Project>
  <PropertyGroup>
      <CustomizableOutDir>true</CustomizableOutDir>
  </PropertyGroup>
</Project>

Also, you may run into some problems if you're trying to compile what was once a "website" project type (created from File->New->Website->ASP.NET Webiste). They seem to override the output directory every time. We had to convert some of those to class libraries instead.