Release manager for TFS 2013 app.config processing with token files

Question

I seem to be getting a lot of pain with the processing of app.config and token files (we have this working with the older ".11" templates).

It looks like currently (using the ReleaseTfvcTemplate.12.xaml) this is running the tokenisation after the build.

While I can make the app.config / myapp.exe.config stuff work by deliberately copying the .token file into my output folder (so the recursive search finds it) this feels pretty horrid.

As a fix I'm tempted to move lines 182-230 to just before the RunMSBuild task on line 175 (creating a new sequence at that point)

Is this the correct approach or have I missed some documentation somewhere (or a later version of the template?)

Answer 1

The replacement of variables in config files with Release Management happens at deployment time and not at compile time.

When RM deployes your app it inserts the correct variables.

Answer 2

It sounds like you're hitting one of two issues:

1. You need to include the .token file in your project and make sure it's set to Copy Always, so that it gets copied to the build output folder.

2. If you're building a web application, I've seen a bug in the release build process template that doesn't touch the contents of the _PublishedWebsites folder. I don't know if it's been fixed in Update 4 or not, but it was definitely still a problem in earlier versions.

Answer 3

Thanks guys... Anyway for future reference I did make the change.

However I had misunderstood the exact nature of the order things happen out of the box which is as follows:

• Get the project out of source control
• build with msbuild
• Copy the .config.token file over the .config file. This is in the TFS template
• As part of the deploy to a server then the token entries in the .config files are replaced. This is in the release manager template.
• Tests are run in the msbuild binary output folders.

The problem is this doesn't really work if you're using an project type that uses app.config file as the msbuild process renames these output.exe.config during the msbuild stage so you need to create both an output.exe.config (marked as copy to output) and an output.exe.config.token so when the post deploy is the final output gets configured correctly. This also a problem if you want to tokenise some mstest dlls as these typically use an app.config as well. Basically this is a bit of a mess unless you are using web.config.

We worked our way around this by using the modification I suggested above (you need to create a sequence at line 175 and move lines 178-230 up into the sequence, this is GetBuildDirectory variable bits and the if statement) followed by adding an additional deployment stage which copies back onto the build server with the new tokenised files so the mstest can run against them.

So our new process looks like this:

• Get the project out of source control
• Copy the .config.token file over the .config file i.e app.config.token copied over app.config
• build with msbuild (this means we end up with tokenised myapp.exe.config and mytests.dll.config)
• As part of the deploy to a server then the token entries in the .config files are replaced. This is a release management step in the release template.
• Deploy the tests back into a folder on build server (think this has to be a fixed folder until update 4 of release manager is deployed) the token entries in the .config files are replaced (so our integration tests can use the newly deployed servers). This is a release management step in the release template.
• Tests are run in the fixed folder on the build server (rather than the msbuild output directory) so the test wildcard needs to be changed in the tfs build template.

Quick final note we don't use that build directory variable and it's left at blank I'm not convinced this would work if it was set to a value...