how to do continuous integration with service fabric with tfs 2013?

Question

There exists a great amount of documentation and samples on how to create build definitions for VSTS and TFS 2015+ for Service Fabric continuous integration and deployment.

What is available in terms of integration with TFS 2013 for deployment of Service Fabric applications?

How do we integrate the build and deployment of on-premises Service Fabric clusters / applications / services with TFS 2013?

Answer 1

Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable distributed applications. It was developed as a Microsoft-internal-only platform for over five years, which shipped publicly as a product in 2015.

The vNext build is also released on 2015 and have many benefit such as simple, deep Customization than XAML build. So most documentation is related to vNext build.

According to the build and release steps in documentation you provided above,it's general normal tasks such as build , test, copy files ,publish artifacts, it's not hard to convert to XAML build. You just need to do some build activities customization. One specific task is Azure Resource Group Deployment Task, there is no such correspondingly in XAML build. However, this task is used to create or update a resource group in Azure using the Azure Resource Manager templates. You could try to use powershell to achieve this part. The most import is using powershell script to publish to Service Fabric.

Actually, when working on TFS2013 XAML build, usually we integrate with Azure Cloud Service not service fabric. There are also related blog with detail steps show how to do it. You could take a reference: Continuous Delivery for Cloud Services in Azure

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Moreover, since you are still using XAML build and stay on TFS2013. We encourage you update your TFS version to get latest technology and move to new web-based vNext build system. On TFS2018, we even removed support for XAML Builds. For the benefit of VNext builds, you could refer to this article: Why You Should Switch to Build VNext