Making Team Builds More Verbose

Build engineering is one of the most challenging parts of Team System. It can be difficult to get a Team Build working exactly the way you want. When you're troubleshooting a build, the build log output file, BuildLog.txt, is your best friend.

The build log is fairly helpful as-is, but it's possible to make it even more verbose in those times when you're troubleshooting an obscure build problem.

Visual Studio, like Team Build, also uses MSBuild under the hood to compile solutions. In Visual Studio, you can set the build verbosity via a handy IDE setting. It's under Tools, Options, Projects and Solutions, Build and Run. The "MSBuild project build output verbosity" field offers four values: Quiet, Minimal (the default), Normal, Detailed, and Diagnostic.

You can also set verbosity via a Team Build script.

MSBuild.exe supports the verbosity command line parameter: 

/verbosity:<level> Display this amount of information in the event log.
                   The available verbosity levels are: q[uiet], m[inimal],
                   n[ormal], d[etailed], and diag[nostic]. (Short form: /v)
                   Example:
                     /verbosity:quiet

All we need to do is edit the TFSBuild.rsp file in our TeamBuildTypes folder to pass this parameter on to MSBuild.exe: 

# This is a response file for MSBuild
# Add custom MSBuild command line options in this file
/v:diag

Check TFSBuild.rsp in, and then do a build. The resulting BuildLog.txt will be much more.. er.. verbose!

Here are the results of running a build for each verbosity level:

diagnostic825 KB
detailed288 KB
normal48 KB
minimal12 KB
quiet0 KB

The default verbosity level for Team Build is normal, so be careful when ratcheting it all the way up to diagnostic!

posted on Monday, February 12, 2007 11:47 AM by jatwood

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