How does Team Foundation Build choose which version of Visual Studio to build with?

Question

Looking to evaluate VS2015, we wish to install it side-by-side with VS2013 on a build PC. Our builds are run using Team Foundation Build and I can't see how a build will decide what version of VS to use when building a given solution. Is it tied to the version of Team Foundation Server being used, or perhaps the newest version will be used by default?

This is only for a quick test to see what happens when we try build our codebase under 2015, we're investigating rather than porting at this time. I'm not really familiar with how VS/TFS/TFSBuild versions fit together.

Answer 1

You can specify which version of msbuild/visual studio to use from the command line. I do this in some of my builds via the MSBuild Arguments section in the Process tab. Here is an example of what I set it to if I want it to use Visual Studio 2013:

/p:VisualStudioVersion=12.0

Also here is another SO post that might help you with the specifics of your question above.

How to launch correct version of Msbuild