Error reporting in TFS with Cake build and MSBuild

Question

On compilation errors in one of my projects, the build results page on TFS is significantly less informative than I'd hoped; I only get this:

I had hoped more for something like this (from a different project built the same way):

What do I need to do to get TFS to show the specific errors?

---

I build both projects using Cake build with the following target definition:

Task("Build")
    .IsDependentOn("Update version")
    .Does(() =>
    {
        Information("Verbosity: {0}", verbosity);
        MSBuild(solutionPath, settings =>
        {
            settings.SetConfiguration(configuration);
            settings.SetVerbosity(verbosity);
        });
    });

Answer 1

This sounds like it could be solved by using a custom MSBuild logger . Currently we do not have one built into Cake, but if you add an issue to Cake's issue tracker we can take this into consideration for a future release.

As a temporary solution, you could write a custom logger and provide it to the MSBuild alias using the ArgumentCustomization property on the MSBuild tool settings.

If TFS provides a MSBuild logger out of the box, you should be able to reference that one.