Getting MSB6006 errors for MSTest under TFS Team Build 2008

I have been rebuilding our TFS build systems on Hyper-V based virtualised hardware. The long term plan being to hold a configured build server as as Hyper-V template to we could prevision extra ones quickly, or rebuild all of them if we need to upgrade some library or tool; in effect to give us revision control over our build servers.

All seemed to be going OK, initially existing builds seemed to be running OK when targeted at the new server. However I soon saw that tests were failing with the error

MSBUILD : warning MSB6006: "MSTest.exe" exited with code 1

Further digging into the build log showed the tests were being run but the copy to the drop location was failing.

Side note: if you read older TFS documentations and many blogs it says to add the flag

/v:diagnostic

to the TFSbuild.rsp file to get more logging – this is wrong with MSBuild 3.5 as used by TFS 2008. This now defaults to the highest level of logging, so to reduced it you must use

/fileLoggerParameters:verbosity=normal

so no help in debugging. Anyway back to the plot……

In the past our single build server used a share on its own disk as the file drop, but now as we intend multiple build servers I decided to have a central build share on main data store server. This had been setup with read/write access to the folder and the share associated for the tfsbuild domain user that the Team Build service runs as.

Turns out this is not enough. You also have to give read/write access to the tfsservice domain user as well. It seems the publish of the test results comes from the TFS server  not the build process. hence needing the extra rights. Once the change is made all work fine