Dependency management with TFS 2010

Question

What is the best way to manage dependencies with TFS 2010 ?

EDIT: I would like to know if there is a system such as Maven or NuGet which allows to easily manage dependencies of .dll (externals or created by our team) inside TFS 2010. However we face the problem that we want to be able to modify the code of our dll and test in real time if they work (without publishing a new package).

Answer 1

It's actually pretty easy to invoke NuGet as a pre-build step. You can override the BeforeBuild target in your *.*proj file for the project with NuGet references.

<Target Name="BeforeBuild">
  <Exec Command="&quot;$(SolutionDir)Tools\nuget&quot; install &quot;$(ProjectDir)packages.config&quot; -o &quot;$(SolutionDir)Packages&quot;" Condition="'$(BuildingInsideVisualStudio)'==''" />
</Target>

As implied by the snippet above, you'll want to download the NuGet command line utility, place it in a folder beneath your solution folder, and check it into version control. Note that the executable you download is actually a bootstrapper that you'll want to run once to download the real executable.

Next you'll want to check in the packages.config file from your project directory, but not the packages folder beneath your solution directory. Note that I've included a check for $(BuildingInsideVisualStudio) to not be set in the pre-build step above. This will cause the packages to be downloaded and installed at build-time when building with the TFS build service (or from the command line). It won't affect your NuGet experience inside Visual Studio.

You can search for articles on automating the creation of NuGet packages with TFS - quite a few people have blogged about it. The combination of the two makes for a very capable dependency management solution. Now we just need a NuGet feed built into TFS ;).

Answer 2

If your question relates to managing external project dependencies of a common base lib you're building yourself, some people call this subsystem branching or dependency replication.

Here's three links to articles that handle this subject:

http://geekswithblogs.net/terje/archive/2008/11/02/article-on-subsystem-branching.aspx

http://blog.ehn.nu/2009/03/implementing-dependency-replication-with-tfs-team-build/

http://blog.ehn.nu/2010/12/dependency-replication-with-tfs-2010-build/

I just happened to have these at hand since I'm looking for a way to handle this stuff myself just now.