Team Building your MSI – How to build a Setup Project via Team Build

David Williams - Building a Setup/Install project using Team Build/TFS

“Team Build is great for building Projects applications such as Windows or Web apps.  However it is not able to build Install packages.  Because of this you have to use the Visual Studio build command line option, and copy the .msi and setup.exe files out of the local build directory.  My builds usually copy the built files from to a stage or production server, However this is difficult to do, as no TB/MSbuild variables correctly reference the local build location.  To build a visual studio setup project, I did the following:

1. Enable building in the Solution configuration manager.  Select the configuration manger, checked build next to the Install project name. 
2. Open the ApplicationSetup.proj file in a text editor. Searching for ProjectOutput, SourcePath, I confirmed the path was relative to the project file (..\\obj\\Release\\HelloWorld.exe) rather then literal (C:\HelloWorld\obj\\Release\\HelloWorld.exe).
3. Modified the Build project, adding the build target type
4. …”

Some tips and snips for building your Setup Project/MSI via Team Build.

Remember friends don’t let friend use “F5” (or right click/build) as a long term deployment mechanism… ;)