Forcing TFS 2013 to use VS 2015 as a Build Agent

Question

Not too sure if what I'm asking here is possible, or if it requires an upgrade. My problem is that I have a local install of TFS 2013 (that is, on-premises), and all dev machines have now upgraded to VS2015. However, when using new features (such as $"test {teststring}" ), we get build errors.

The build machine has both VS2013 and VS2015 installed, and is using the default build template (TfvcTemplate.12.xaml). Looking at the "Run MSBuild" task inside the build workflow, there doesn't seem to be any way to point it to one MSBuild or another.

Is it possible to hint to the build to use the later version of VS / MSBuild and, if so, how?

Answer 1

Try adding /tv:14 to the msbuild commandline arguments in your build template, if that doesn't work, edit the xaml file for your build process template and override the "ToolPath" property of the "Run MsBuild for Project" task . Or make that field configurable through further customization of the build template.

Set that path to C:\\Program Files (x86)\\MSBuild\\14.0\\Bin (or your equivalend location in case your machine uses alternate default directory names).