I recently found out about a blog entry written by Grant Holliday, that describes how to extend an MS Build process within an automated Team Foundation Build so that a release notes textfile is generated and copied to the drop location.

This basically goes something like this:

1. Download and install the MS Build Community Tasks from tigris
2. Download and install the MSXSL.exe tool from Microsoft
3. Extend the build.proj file

This process involves the WebDownload build tasks that retrieves the buildlog.xml file from the respective TFS webservice after the build is done. Nex step is transforming the xml file to generate a releasenotes.txt file.

Everything you need to know to get things done is very well documented on Hollidays blog.

However, there are two things to notice: First, you need to download the Community Tasks msi file directly from tigris. The link, Holliday provides, leads to an outdated version that does not include the UseDefaultCredentials property. The result ist, that the process will terminate with a 401 error due to missing authorization.

Second, Holliday does not provide an example xsl file for transformation of the xml file.

To achieve the same result as Holliday does (and shows on the blurry screenshot), you can try using the following xsl file: ReleaseNotes.xsl