TFS Alternative to Cloaking – shorten build base path

I was facing yet another [ProjectName] “contains more than the allowed 259 characters. Type or select a shorter path.”

I have learned how to cloak these entries when they are not needed for the build I am doing, and we have also resorted to shortening the path names of some so that we can include them. But our base folders were pretty long so I decided to try and change them. I googled for the $(SourceDir) entry and found a couple of helpful articles:

tfs – How do I change the build directory that MSBuild uses under Team Foundation Build? – Stack Overflow

TFS Top Tip #16 – Limit What you Build – Martin Woodward

From these I was able to change the entries in the config and Build Agent settings that would help me to shorten the path to something that would stop the madness of cloaking and avoid the above error (until we go above the limit again).

Here is what I did (this is all VS and TFS 2008):

I went to the Team Explorer in Visual Studio and right clicked on Builds and selected

I then inside the the manage selected my (only) build agent and got the window below:

Changing this from e:\teambuild\projects (which was a decent naming convention) to the shortened E:\Bld saved us 15 characters which solved a bunch of path length issues.

In addition, I changed the default “Sources” in the file

c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\tfsbuildservice.exe.config

from <add key=”SourcesSubdirectory” value=”Sources” />

to <add key=”SourcesSubdirectory” value=”Src” />

saving me an additional 4 characters for a full 19 characters of shortening.

This seems very silly in a world where we are trying to be more descriptive and I hope that MS will eventually let us do as we please with our file and folders, but it saved us some hassle and maybe it will save you some too.