Create a Custom "Builds" List on Your TFS Project Portal (a.k.a. SharePoint Team Site)

One of "tweaks" that I commonly make to the SharePoint team site created for each project in Team Foundation Server is to create a custom list to track the important builds for the project (typically corresponding to each milestone or iteration).

There's really nothing special about the list. It's just a custom list (named Builds) that appears in the Quick Launch navigation and has two columns on the default view:

• Title (Single line of text, default column)
• Version (Single line of text)

I use the default Title field to specify the milestone or iteration (e.g. Sprint-1, Sprint-2, etc.) and the custom Version field to specify the assembly version of the build (technically the Assembly File Version).

Shortly before or after a release to the Production environment (i.e. whenever the build number of the release is known), I add a new item to the list. If the build number changes (for example, because of a QFE/hotfix), I update the version on the existing list item. [Note that if you want to view the history of a particular item in the list to see who changed what and when the change was made, you can enable Item Version History on the list. Simply click Settings --> List Settings, and then in the General Settings section, click Versioning settings.]

For example, here are the contents of the list for my current project:

This list makes it very easy for anyone with access to the team site to determine which build was associated with a particular release.

I suppose that I could spend a few seconds renaming the Title column to something like Milestone or Iteration, but honestly I don't bother (at least not anymore).