Merge Development branch into Staging branch on Build - Team Foundation Server

Question

Is it possible to merge the development branch into the staging branch, when the development branch successfully builds?

Answer 1

You can configure a build definition to your staging branch in "Gated Checkin mode" trigger.

When you commit code to staging branch a build must be run successfully before you code is uploaded to source control.

You can find more information about "Gated Checkin" in MSDN:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd787631.aspx

Answer 2

Assuming your goal is to have your code deploy to a staging environment then I would suggest that you have the wrong promotion model there. Code promotion models, like you describe above, are pretty antagonistic to continuous anything. Either you just want continuous integration, or you want to go all the way to continuous delivery you are doing it wrong. Switch from code promotion to binary promotion.

You should build a single version of your application, from a single branch, and promote that through various states of quality. Added bonus is any tests run against these binaries are valid passed in any environment. Recompile and you have to reset your test plan.

http://nakedalm.com/create-release-management-pipeline-professional-developers/

It pretty east technically to change to a binary model. Any difficulty will be political and cultural within your organisation. It is however very much a fight worth having.

Answer 3

You could customize your build, so it does this using the tf.exe command-line client (or the TFS API). I would use a powershell script, that in-turn used the tf.exe tool to do a merge + check-in to the desired branch.

However, the problem is this only works if there are no conflicts. If there are conflicts, you won't be able to automatically resolve them in order to complete the merge.