TFS 2008/2010 vs Jenkins for Continuous Integration

Question

Does anyone have specific experiences with using TFS 2008/2010 AND Jenkins for Continuous Integration (CI)? We are trying to decide which CI server to use. Our team works exclus

Answer 1

Late to this game, but I have used both TFS 2010 and Jenkins for CI. TFS 2010 has minimum set of CI tools in it. However, when you want to create a CI pipeline, it's a completely different story while Jenkins can easily create the pipeline.

If you are looking at only CI for one build either one should work. However, when it comes to the entire pipeline, Jenkins is way to go. With TFS it can be done, but Jenkins is better choice.

Here's quick bullet points:

TFS:

• With a build definition you can compile, execute tests, return changeset/workitems, send an email when a build is broken

• natural integration with visual studio

• extremely hard to create CI pipeline. Requires custom handler and extensive workflow work. Not as intuitive as creating a build definition.

• Because of the 3rd bullet, it's not easy to maintain/customize/scale CI pipeline

Jenkins:

• Need to create a msbuild config file for CI, which is not much pain comparing to creating CI pipeline using TFS. However, TFS gives better/easier tool to create a build definition. however, it is not bad creating config file for msbuild for a project.

• Creating a CI pipeline is very easy. Just chain them using upstream/downstream jenkins job trigger and passing an artifact from previous job.

• Since Jenkins is very flexible, it is easy to create a jenkins plugin to meet your own needs and provide it to opensource community :)

In summary, if you need complete automated build, test, and deployment system go with Jenkins. If you just need only build and test, TFS might give you an edge over Jenkins.