The action Team Foundation Latest Version Number was broken. This was quicly fixed, so I don't have a problem at the moment. However, while creating a workaround, I came across some other issues. This is one of them.
I was running an action Execute Program, which did exactly what Team Foundation Latest Version Number was supposed to do. You only need to know that it is a command that outputs text, and the output was stored in a variable Output.
When running action List Iterator with content %Output% I got the following log lines:
Setting items...
Error expanding Item List : Variable : OutDir - does not exist!
Error while searching for items : Failed to expand list of items.
I then inserted another action Write to Text File immediately after Execute Program so I could study the content of variable Output, to see if that mysterious "OutDir" was within. And this unexpectedly resulted in this log entry for Write to Text File:
Error expanding Content : Variable : OutDir - does not exist!
I then studied the output of the Execute Program in the log, and eventually found this line in the output of the command:
49 patrik:2 09.02.2010 Attemt with adding extra path $(OutDir) to
Now, there's the mysterious OutDir it seems to me.
Is this a bug? Is there some processing going on that shouldn't be going on? Is there some option I overlooked? In my opinion these actions shouldn't try to parse variable contents just like that, especially if there is no option to prevent it.
I solved this by adding a workaround to my workaround, which simply replaces all "$" with "X" in variable Output before I go on to parse its lines inside the List Iterator loop.