TFS 2008 CustomizableOutputDir makes TeamBuild & BizTalk Deployment Framework work together

In our project we need to compile a set of projects (Biztalk and tests projects). We managed to get it compiled with tfs build quite straithforward using standard tfs build.proj file.

To deploy BizTalk generated apps we use BizTalk Deployment Framework (BTDF). It worked quite well using BTDF Visual Studio add in but failed when calling BTDF tasks from TFSBuild. The problem is the output dir were dlls are dropped. BTDF can’t find dlls generated by TFSBuild’s compile tasks and fails.

• TeamBuild puts all generated dlls following the $(TeamBuildOutDir) variable. By default its the /Binaries subfolder.
• BTDF just like Visual Studio compiles using project’s outputPath (by default /bin/Debug)

Thus, to make things work we used set the CustomizableOutputDir property to “true” in TFSBuild.proj solution to make BTDF use TeamBuild generated dlls.

A usefull link to better understand ouput directory structures  with VS and TFS : http://blogs.msdn.com/aaronhallberg/archive/2007/06/07/preserving-output-directory-structures-in-orcas-team-build.aspx