Smarter TFS Incremental Builds

Anyone who does a search for TFS Incremental Builds is bound to stumble across this MSDN page that describes controlling TFS's CoreGet with the following properites:

<PropertyGroup>
<SkipClean>true</SkipClean>
<SkipInitializeWorkspace>true</SkipInitializeWorkspace>
<ForceGet>false</ForceGet>
</PropertyGroup>


The problem that I notice with this though is that it fails when you are running the build for the first time and the workspace has never been initialized. This is normally not a huge problem except that I recently I needed to create a BuildType that involved performing a full nightly build and on demand incremental builds. I needed a way to conditionalize the behavior.

Then I realized that I could simply have my schedule task delete the build workspace if I could get my BuildType to be smart enough to prime the pump when the build didn't exist. The result is this simple change:


<PropertyGroup Condition="Exists($(SolutionRoot))">
<SkipClean>true</SkipClean>
<SkipInitializeWorkspace>true</SkipInitializeWorkspace>
<ForceGet>false</ForceGet>
</PropertyGroup>


If the directory is missing, the BuildType defaults to performing a Full Build and if it already exists, it defaults to performing an Incremental Build.