How to find build event output in TFS build

Question

We have a solution with a lot of projects. One of those projects contains a Visual Studio pre-build event, that auto-generates all code files used in that project. This works rather well on our local machines.

However building it using TFS build it fails with the rather undescriptive "exited with code XY". So, the pre-build event fails, but so far I have been unable to find the output normally generated by that event (console output).

I tried debugging the TFS Build service, but that gave me nothing, I increased the build logging to "Diagnostics" but still nothing. No build log file seems to be generated anywhere.

So is this output available anywhere, and if so where?

Answer 1

In the "View Summary" view of the build results view, you should see a summary of the number of projects/solutions compiled with an expand/collapse triangle next to it. If you expand that node, you should see a "View Log File" link that will open the raw MSBuild log.