Default setting might cause problems with TFS2010 Builds

Do you experience problems with your builds in TFS2010?
Unchanged builds that sometimes work and sometimes fail?

You might have problems with build agents. Build agents are used on build servers, and also on target machines to make it all work.
When you start up a new build, default is a build agent called *. So sometimes the build servers agent is used, and sometimes any other agent found on the network.
Of course this behavior is good if you have several identical build servers and want to take the first free one. However, if the other build agent is not a complete build server with Visual Studio installed, the build fails.

Here you can see a certain section of the Build definition with the default value of the build agent, which is the wildcard.

So be sure to point out a build agent that can be used to build your solution. This also makes the naming of you build agents important, so you can use the wild card in a good way. For example, call all build servers something with VSBuild, and you can use *VSBuild* as your build agent – and any free agent matching this name will be used.

In this image you can see that I have specified which build server to use.

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