Team Build IsA MSBuild?

I had one of those Aha! moments this weekend. You know, the ones that Oprah is always talking about (not that I watch, it just happens to be on sometimes when I’m in the room…) It turns that somehow in my dealings with Team Foundation Build (i.e. “Team Build”) I had always maintained this subconscious assumption that Team Build was really just MSBuild++, or rather, a proper superset of the functionality that MSBuild provides. I probably wouldn’t even have balked had someone shown me a UML diagram like this:

The assertion there being that Team Build is just a realization of MSBuild, extended to work in a broader, team environment. A follow-on assertion (that certainly I made) is that the team who created Team Build started with MSBuild as a basis and worked out. My “Aha! Moment” was realizing that in fact it is not an IsA relationship at all, but rather a pure HasA relationship:

Testing a Task

In my previous post I described the creation of a custom MSBuild task to aid in building WiX projects under TFS. However, one thing I have always disliked about most of the code nuggets found on blogs and magazine articles, which I find highly inexcusable in today’s development landscape, is that they rarely include any tests to prove that their code actually works. Therefore, this post is intended to demonstrate that throwing in a few simple unit tests with code samples is easy and goes a long way toward helping readers understand and trust the code being published.