Team Explorer Everywhere – A Plug-in to access TFS from Eclipse (TeamBuild with Ant)

In my previous article, Team Explorer Everywhere – A Plug-in to access TFS from Eclipse – Part I  we saw that ‘Team Explorer  Everywhere’ (TEE) is an Eclipse plug-in that is being provided by Microsoft with the Visual Studio 2010.

The purpose of this plug-in is to provide access to Team Foundation Server 2010 from Eclipse which is one of the most popular IDEs for Java development. In this way now the projects that are being developed using Java technology can also leverage the benefits like integrated services for workitem tracking, source control, build management, reporting and portal for the team collaboration.

In my previous article, I started out with the exploration of Team Explorer Everywhere (TEE) and covered the grounds of Installation, configuration, accessing Team Project by connecting to a TFS and using source control of TFS for Java Project. In this article I will wander deeper in the woods of using Team Build for Java projects created using Eclipse.

If you haven’t already, you can download the latest TEE installable in the .ZIP format from Microsoft site. I guessed that for Java Project to build, the build engine will require to know the compiler and its location. It is also quite obvious that Java project does not have the kind of project structure that is required by Team Build. It does not have the solution, .sln file and Project.

All of these pointed towards the fact that I may not be able to use Team Build workflow or MSBuild based build definition directly. A little bit of research revealed that Microsoft has published a power tool called “Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 Build Extensions” that provides extensibility to use existing Ant or Maven build scripts through Team Build.

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