TFS Deployer - Team Foundation Server Release/Deployment Utility

notgartner - Getting Started with TFS Deployer

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Introducing TFS Deployer

TFS Deployer is installed as an agent on your test and production systems and supports the execution of PowerShell scripts when an event happens in TFS. In particular it listens fo build quality change notificaions which occur when you change the quality of a build under the Team Builds node of Team Explorer.

The way it works is that the release manager, using Team Explorer updates the build quality indicator in the build store via Team Explorer (1), the build store then notifies the event service (2) which in turn distributes notifications to all the event subscribers. In this case you can have one or more TFS Deployer installations listening across multiple machines (3). When TFS Deployer is notified it doesn’t initially know whether it needs to do anything. To determine this it grabs a deployment mapping file from a well known location in the version control store (4).

The deployment mapping file lists out each of the servers and what that server should do in the event that a build is transitioned from quality state to another. What happens is encapsulated in a PowerShell script file (*.ps1) and once that script file is identified TFS Deployer will instansiate a PowerShell host environment and execute the script (5).

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Interesting... I can't use this today (I think...? need to think about it for a bit), but I really like the idea.

Using PowerShell means it's extremely extensible and so could be used for so many thing...