Pass value from MSBuild Task to TFS Build Workflow

Question

There are numerous examples and ways on passing a property value from TFS 2010 Build Workflow into MSBuild however I need to do the reverse.

Basically on the build boxes custom target files have been written to do some processing on all the builds that run on the boxes. These target files have custom tasks in them some of which expose return values (or output parameters).

I would like to be able to read the values of these output parameters from within the build workflow (TFS 2010) if possible. So basically

1. A TFS 2010 Build workflow runs on a build server
2. The build server has custom target files which inject into the MSBuild Pipeline and do some processing
3. The results from 2. above need to go back into the TFS Build Workflow.

Would appreciate some help into this problem please.

Answer 1

One way would be to write the output data to a location that is easily accessible from TFS Workflow. Such as a file. Then you'd need to customize the TFS Workflow a bit to read in from the file following the MSBuild activity.