Where to manage the build location in TFS 2008

Until now I’d been confused between the agent working directory, the build service accounts’s temp folder, and the workspace created by Team Build. Do I have to manage all three settings? Do they have to be different? Today I discovered there’s just one location I need to manage for each build agent.

In my efforts to clean up and standardise where projects are being downloaded and built on our build server I discovered that the workspaces automatically created by Team Build don’t actually determine where the build happens. This is because every time TFS performs a build it deletes and recreates a workspace for that build. The source directory path it uses comes from the Build Agent definition:

C# Debug/Release and Performance

I’ve been listening to this webcast today:

GDC 2008: Understanding XNA Framework Performance

I learned an interesting little fact:

“Debug vs Release setting in the IDE when you compile your code in Visual Studio makes almost no difference to performance… the generated code is almost the same. The C# compiler doesn’t really do any optimisation. The C# compiler just spits out IL… and at the runtime it’s the JITer that does all the optimisation. The JITer does have a Debug/Release mode and that makes a huge difference to performance. But that doesn’t key off whether you run the Debug or Release configuration of your project, that keys off whether a debugger is attached.”

Incidentally RoeCode’s XNA game engine series is now at part 18 and is looking pretty nice. I’ve totally slacked off of looking at XNA but I’m totally going to start playing with this again now.