Fixing Stuck/Hung Build in TFS Preview and Dev 11 Beta Build Server

Realizing I hadn’t updated my build server that ran against TFS Preview to the Beta Dev 11 TFS, I upgraded the machine and ran into a problem. The first queued build stuck and could not be canceled or deleted from the queue, thus blocking all builds. With an on premises TFS you can go into the SQL database and change the state of the build, but last I checked Microsoft won’t let us access our TFS Preview hosted SQL tables with SQL Management Studio.

My scenario was a build controller running the Dev 11 Developer Preview TFS that was upgraded in place to the Dev 11 Beta TFS bits and kicking off builds from Visual Studio 2010. Since most of you will start with fresh Dev 11 Beta bits, I doubt anyone will run into the situation I had but will post the solution for karma points from the one other person who hits this.

The upgrade itself went great and I was able to see the build servers from VS 2010. I checked in some changes that triggered a CI build and after 20 minutes saw that nothing had happened in the build. In Visual Studio 2010 I tried to cancel the build but no status changed. In the TFS Preview web site trying to cancel the build reported an error: “TFS.ServerException: TF215067: Cannot cancel queued build 48 on build controller BUILDSERVER – Controller. The current status is In Progress and queued builds can only be canceled if the status is either Postponed or Queued.” Shutting down Visual Studio, the build controller machine didn’t help either. Because of the stuck build, I couldn’t delete the build controller either.

Firing up a new machine (named COMPILESERVER), I installed the Dev 11 Beta TFS and configured a new build server and said to replace an existing build server (named BUILDSERVER). That transferred the stuck build to COMPILESERVER. On BUILDSERVER, I unregistered the build server and removed the build server feature through the TFS Admin Console. Still on BUILDSERVER, I added back the build server feature and configured this to be a second build server against my TFS Preview hosted collection.

Back in Visual Studio 2010, I queued up a new build against the updated BUILDSERVER and the stuck queued build immediately vanished. My new build worked fine and I was able to remove the build server from COMPILESERVER.