What happened to the TFS 2013 Build Templates?

I have had a couple people asking me “where are the build templates in TFS 2013?”.

Well they have been removed!
Don’t worry, they are still available though …

By default, they are now simply stored in TFS and not in the repository.

When creating a build definition you will notice that the default build templates can simply be selected (as per usual).

When you need to use a custom template, or modify the existing templates you can simple download the template,

make your changes and then upload the updated build template to the repository as per normal.

Microsoft has reworked things in the build templates, simplifying it quite a lot. Hopefully altering your build processes will no longer be such a daunting task!