How To Stop a Team Foundation Server Build with Samurai Style

This afternoon I kicked off a Team Build and waited...

.. and waited ...

... and waited...

... and then realized something was terribly wrong with the TFS server. A general sense of panic swept into the office when we couldn't bring up the login dialog box on the server's console. A recent rash of hardware failures made us jumpy and we feared the worst. Just a couple months ago, 2 out of 3 drives in a RAID 5 array died in a single afternoon. What are the odds?

The server came back to life after a hard reboot, but the last build was "stuck". There wasn't any activity on the build server, yet TFS thought the build was still in progress. I couldn't find a way to stop the build in Visual Studio, so I turned to the Internet. My first search brought up KillBill.exe – a utility in the TFS PowerPack that "Stops a Team Build currently running on a build server". Perfect!

Afterwards, I found out you can also stop a build from the command line, but that's not nearly as entertaining as an application that evokes thoughts of a hyper-violent kung-fu cinematic mashup.

The other utility in the TFS PowerPack is the "Work Item Terminator". There is a theme at work in this project, and I like it. I hope future versions include the "Clockwork Orange Build Timer" and the "Check-in policy Robocop".