Upgrading a TFS 2013 Continuous Delivery Platform to TFS 2015

In a previous post I described the high-level process for upgrading the continuous delivery platform I've been using for my Continuous Delivery with TFS blog post series to TFS 2013 Update 5. With the release of TFS 2015 on 6 August 2015 it's now time to upgrade this platform to the brand new version. See my previous post for the list of servers that participate in my continuous delivery platform, and as with the upgrade to TFS 2013 Update 5 all servers had been patched with the latest Windows Updates.

Team Foundation Server

There is a wealth of advice for upgrading to TFS 2015 and if you are upgrading a production instance you'll probably want to do some research. A good starting point is the ALM Rangers' TFS Upgrade -- New Elements of TFS 2015 that influence an upgrade. I can also recommend listening to Radio TFS episode 95 -- Out and About with TFS 2015, and don't forget to check out the show links.

Since I was upgrading a non-production instance I dove straight in, mounted the iso and started the setup routine. After installing the bits the Upgrade Wizard started automatically and as with previous upgrades each page of the wizard was straightforward.

One addition to the wizard is a page to configure the new Team Foundation Build. Although in the fullness of time anyone upgrading will want to move to the new build system it is quite likely that you will need to keep existing XAML builds running as you gradually move over. This is fully supported but you will need to enable this from the Team Foundation Server Administration Console under Additional Tools and Components > XAML Build Configuration. The good news is that settings from the previous version of TFS are remembered. You can read the release notes for TFS 2015 here and the list of known issues here.

Visual Studio

Although TFS 2015 is backwards compatible with some prior versions of Visual Studio many teams are likely to want to move to Visual Studio 2015 at the same time as moving to TFS 2015. Visual Studio 2015 installs side-by-side with previous versions and whilst the installation process is straightforward there are some other things to consider since the installation routine now offers third party products as well as the ability to select just the Microsoft components you require. I chose to keep things light but did take the opportunity to install PowerShell and Git-based components as they are areas I want to explore for future blogs.

As a test of Visual Studio 2015 I opened up my Contoso University sample application (previously created in Visual Studio 2013) and the only issue was with the SQL Server Database Project whose connection string was referring to a previous version of LocalDB. This was a quick fix as per Bill Wagner's post -- don't forget to update Web.config as well if this affects you. Whilst Contoso University worked fine locally, running an existing XAML build on the new TFS 2015 instance wasn't quite as successful and partially failed with TF900547: The directory containing the assemblies for the Visual Studio Test Runner is not valid ‘C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\TestWindow'. I'd pretty much expected something like this since I hadn't installed Visual Studio 2015 yet on my all-in-one TFS machine which hosts the build agent, and performing the install (Microsoft components only) fixed this problem. (As an aside, I always make sure Visual Studio instances on a build agent server are registered with a licence key to avoid trial period expiry problems.) You can read the release notes for Visual Studio 2015 here and the list of known issues here.

Release Management

As discussed in my previous post there was no Update 5 to Release Management 2013 and instead Release Management 2015 was released and is backwards compatible with TFS 2013. Since I'd already upgraded to Release Management 2015 there was nothing much for me to do except test that the build definition that started my release pipeline still worked -- which it did! However, the automated web tests part of the pipeline (based on the MTM Automated Tests Manager tool) was still running against 2013 Agents and Microsoft Test Manager 2013 and naturally I wanted to get these components upgraded.

Microsoft Test Manager and Agents for Visual Studio

Microsoft Test Manager 2015 (aka Test Professional 2015) is installed as part of Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise however it is also available as a separate installation for testers who don't use Visual Studio or where it is needed to run the bundled tcm.exe. The latter scenario applies to me as I have a Windows 8.1 web client machine that runs automated web tests written using Selenium that require FireFox, Microsoft Test Manager and Agents for Visual Studio (Test Agent component) to be installed. I upgraded this machine (please keep reading as most of what I did was unnecessary) by first uninstalling Microsoft Test Manager 2013 and the Agents for Visual Studio 2013 and then installing and configuring the 2015 replacements. One key difference was that at the time of writing there was no upgrade to the Test Controller component of the Agents for Visual Studio 2015 so the Test Agent was shipping as a standalone exe. However, when I came to configure the Test Agent there was no Test Agent Configuration Tool for Agents for Visual Studio 2015. No matter since I knew it would be possible to partially configure the agent from Microsoft Test Manager 2015 (Lab Center > Environments and then choose to repair). However, all this did was install Agents for Visual Studio 2013. (Note that when it does this the service will run under Network Service. If you want to use a domain account you need to use the Test Agent Configuration Tool on the machine where the test agent is installed.) So a lot of work for nothing and it looks like we'll need to wait for a new Test Controller before the Test Agent can be upgraded.

Last Piece of the Puzzle

I wasn't done yet, since I upgraded Microsoft Test Manager on the web client and it turns out that the PowerShell script that forms part of the MTM Automated Tests Manager tool in Release Management 2015 hasn't been upgraded to work with the Visual Studio 2015 installation path. The proper way to fix this would be to create a new tool  in Release Management (since the built-in tools can't be edited) with an updated script that includes a reference to the VS140COMNTOOLS system environment variable which allows the script to locate tcm.exe. Since I'm due to retire my current continuous delivery infrastructure in the near future (as I prepare for a new blog post series based on TFS2015 Update 1 which should contain the new web-based Release Management) I opted for the quick and dirty trick of pointing the VS120COMNTOOLS system environment variable to C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\Tools\. Probably not something for a production environment but good enough to get my automated web tests working and showing green. Always a relief...

Cheers -- Graham