Sunday, March 30, 2014

Microsoft ALM - Configure agent settings

While creating a build agent in the TFS admin console, you can define the agent name and the tags using the Team Foundation Administration Console and edit the agent properties as shown below.


You can also do this from inside Visual Studio by right-clicking the Builds node in Team Explorer, choosing Manage Build Controllers, and double-clicking a particular agent.

The “Agent Settings” section under “Advanced” section in the Process tab of the build definition can be used to influence agent reservation during the build process.  Under that section, you can specify which agent should run a build for that definition.  The property is “Name Filter” and it has an asterisk by default, which means that any available agent should be used, you can change that to any of the agents on the drop-down list”.   This will ensure that only the selected agent will get picked for that build. You can also redirect specialized builds to specialized build agents by tweaking the build agent reservation properties of the default build process template.


When we schedule a build, we can define an agent name filter, a set of tags and a tag matching criteria. This controls the way the Team Foundation Build Controller selects and reserves a Team Foundation Build Agent to perform our build.


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