My team has long been using a build process that always builds from a the same single branch.
The whole system is based around having low volume of work going on, so 1 person doing 1 task at a time is typical and I suppose this has been sufficient.
However I have been working on a major change that I would like to work on independently from other work and I would like to build this to one of our existing environments.
I noticed that in the build source settings I could change the Source Control Folder to point to my branch instead, but either due to how TFS builds work, or a how it was created here, the "main" branch name ends up being hard coded who knows how many levels deep into scripts called by scripts called by scripts..
I was hoping that I could create a single build definition that took the branch name as a parameter and I could use that everywhere the main branch was hard coded to create one "custom branch" build to rule them all, however when I try to put the parameter into the Source Control Folder path, it's not permitted:
$/BaseDir/$(BranchName)
With the error
The Path '$/BaseDir/$(BranchName)' contains a '$' at the beginning of a path component. Remove the '$' and try again.
This comes from the $(BranchName) part as the $ at the beginning was already there in the working version.
Is this a reasonable thing to do? How can I go about fixing this error, or is there a different way that this is supposed to be done?
