It’s been quite nice since I started playing with Release Management (RM), and then of course some bugs were found and now I already have some impressions about the whole thing.
Components and Release Templates are shared
So, if you want to have a central RM server, be sure it is goind to share your components and release template with all users. Also some other things are shared, and it makes quite hard to manage a centralized server.
Release Template build def picker is not good
If you try to select a team project, it list all you have access, in my case I have full access to our server, then I can see them all. The big problem is that it’s not ordered, it’s hard to find the project you wish.
Also if you have two aliases for the TFS servers, if you select one and try to change it later for the second, it’s impossible, for some reason the RM keeps always the first selection. This I consider a bug, but we worked around, adding another server, setting all release templates for the new server, removed the server we were willing, and then selecting the new tfs server.
Permission errors even with the proper permissions set
This is another annoying issue. We have two Build servers, in on RM was working and in the other it wasn’t. They have the same setup, same users, permissions, folders, software, all the same. When I was trying to deploy from the build it was showing a message that the build service users has no permission to deploy. In fact the user was added as Release Manager in RM tool.
The “Great” solution: Log in the build server, open the RM client and then connect once in some RM server. It makes the deploy work fine. Until no idea why we should do that, but seems to be another bug.
Until now, it was all bad thing I found. And I do really think that this tool is fantastic but has lot of room for improvements and fixes.
Fabio Stawinski 