Continuous Delivery pipeline integrated with TFS

Question

We work on .NET project, using TFS for:

• source control
• builds: gated check-ins that produce MSI files
• deployments to Labs

We want to create a proper Continuous Delivery pipeline, that is a Dashboard with pipelines for each check-in with traffic lights. Pipeline should show all the stages like TFS build > Deploy to Lab > Smoke test > Integration Tests > Acceptance Tests > Deploy to PreProd > ...

So it has to be tightly integrated with TFS.

We are assessing 2 options:

1. use TFS-based tool\\plugin\\dashboard if there are any that can show pipelines?
2. use CI tool for example Jenkins, TeamCity, Bamboo to build this pipeline - ideally with support to fetch built code from TFS drop folder, not just the source code

What would you recommend?

Answer 1

If you are using TFS why don't you leverage the built in Release Management tooling? You can create a release pipeline that is automted and even include approvals I necessary.

http://nakedalm.com/building-release-pipeline-release-management-visual-studio-2013/

If you want to integrate the lab tools for collecting test results as part of your pipeline this works as well.

http://nakedalm.com/execute-tests-release-management-visual-studio-2013/

This works pretty well and the new features anounced at Connect() will make it even better.