Team Foundation Server 2018 Build agent Capabilities VS 2019

Question

We use Team Foundation Server 2018. Since our upgrade to Visual studio 2019 I have been trying to add this capability to TFS 2018, without any success.

TFS version: 2018 (16.122.27102.1)

I have already tried to reconfigure the Agent, or even add a new one. Visual studio 2019 is installed on the TFS server + has the same checks as the 2017.

Deleting VS 2017 on the server doesn't help either, no capabilities found then.

Are there any tips/tricks that I need to perform to get TFS working with VS2019 build?

Answer 1

Team Foundation Server 2018 Build agent Capabilities VS 2019

The Visual Studio is generally compatible with newer versions of Team Foundation Server.

You can see the details specified by Microsoft here: Requirements and compatibility.

Only the latest version has "full" compatibility with the latest Team Foundation Server, because this will be the only client that contains components that can interface with new features for that release, and will also be the only client from which you can perform certain administrative tasks such as creating new team projects.

So, the Team Foundation Server 2018 should be a high level of support VS 2019 not full support.

Team Foundation Server 2018 Agent could not recognize vs2019 and msbuild 16.0 capabilities. Then you could not select the Visual Studio 2019 in the Visual Studio version of VS build task. Because TFS doesn't know how to locate future VS versions

To resolve this issue, you can use MSBuild task instead of Visual Studio Build Step, then specify the location of MSBuild 16.0, it should be:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Enterprise\MSBuild\Current\Bin\MSBuild.exe

Hope this helps.