TFS 2013 makes it easier to separate build server output to different folder. In most of the cases, all you have to do is to change Output Location setting in build definition. Output Location setting can be set to the following values:
- SingleFolder to place all the build output files together in the drop folder.
- PerProject to group the build outputs into drop folder sub-folders for each solution or code project that you have specified in the Projects box.
- AsConfigured to leave the binaries in the build agent sources folder, organized into the same sub-folder structure you see when you build your code on your dev machine in Visual Studio. This structure is defined in your code projects.
- If you use this option, TFBuild will not copy the output to the drop folder. Instead, you can program your scripts to copy the outputs to the location specified by TF_BUILD_BINARIESDIRECTORY so that they get dropped to the staging location. See post-build or post-test scripts.
This is a great feature/setting in TFS 2013 and it works every time. Well, almost every time. PerProject setting is a bit misleading because it does not always group the build outputs per project. In cases, when you choose to build multiple solutions which consists of multiple projects, TFS Build server will split solutions into its different folders. Project output will not be output into separate folders and instead the output for all projects in the solution will be stored in a single folder. Even though your build definition Output Location is set to PerProject. Frustrating. L
To separate project output into different folder when building multiple solutions, you need to set GenerateProjectSpecificOutputFolder MSBuild property to True. To be more precise, set MSBuild arguments setting to /p:GenerateProjectSpecificOutputFolder=True and projects will automatically build into different subfolders. Voila!