Build Futures

This post announces a significant revision to the build automation system for TFS and Visual Studio Online, moving away from the Windows Workflow Foundation (XAML builds) to a new system designed with principles of avoiding new DSLs, cross-platform support, intentional extensibility, and transparent build logs. The new system will be available in TFS 2015 and Visual Studio Online in Q2 2015. Key highlights include easy customization via build steps and custom tasks, real-time web visibility of builds, cross-platform build capabilities for iOS, Android, Java, and Linux, and build definition diffing/auditing. Existing XAML builds will continue to be supported alongside the new system during the transition.