Allow for Long-Running TDS Post Deploy Steps

This post describes how to increase the TDS deployment timeout setting so long-running Post Deploy Steps can complete their execution.

Team Development for Sitecore has many points of extension. You can implement custom code generation, custom MSBuild steps, and even custom project validators. These extensibility points make TDS capable of doing just about anything you want it to do in your build process.
To make things even easier, TDS 5.5 introduced Post Deploy Steps, and, as with many other TDS features, you can extend the Post Deploy Steps to run your own custom code.
Hedgehog are currently looking for developers to think up some custom Post Deploy Steps so they can be shared with the rest of the community.

Creating a Post Deploy Step is easy. Charlie Turano shows how a basic step can be created on the Hedgehog blog.

This is a great start, and something I used when I created some custom post deploy steps of my own.

But something the operation you want to run may take a long time, and if that exceeds the TDS timeout, the deployment will break.

So to prevent your build from breaking, you can easily increase this timeout, both on local dev machines and on build servers.

1. Close all instances of Visual Studio.
2. Open a text editor in Administrator mode.
3. Open C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\HedgehogDevelopment\SitecoreProject\v9.0\HedgehogDevelopment.SitecoreProject.Tasks.dll.config
4. Increase the sendTimeout attribute to whatever value you like. I increased mine to 5 minutes.
   

   sendTimeout="00:05:00"

   sendTimeout="00:05:00"

5. Save the file, and reload Visual Studio.

Now your TDS deployment will allow for the longer time that it takes for your custom post deploy step to run.