How do we delete a release in TFS 2013 Release Management?

Question

We are using the Release Management, TFS 2013 (previously InRelease) and have a lot of releases that we would like to delete. The problem is that the "Delete" button is always greyed out. What are we missing here?

Blader

Can you please share a screen shot of the RM 2013 for your question to mkae it more visible and clear to understood and yes ofcourse to see what actually is Greyed out ??? – Links

check this answer #26609772 – Cordage

Answer 1

This is not possible with the current version (RM 2013 Update 4).

Only Releases in Draft state can be deleted.

Wyne

This doesn't make any sense to me, but clearly this is the case. Not even the Admin account can remove them once they are "In Progress". :( – Boding

Do you have any official sources for this (or perhaps you are part of the RM development team)? Is there any roadmap to enable this feature? I'm in the same situation as the OP. – Contemporaneous

Yes, I am part of the RM team. This will not be part of update 4 neither. It is in the backlog, but don't know when that will be done. – Wyne

I did find this script for manually deleting the releases. Use are your own risk of course.: gist.github.com/riha/d68dba893144559e9305#file-delete-release – Damn

I scanned through the query. Two things I quickly noticed. First this is only valid for Agent-based Releases. Two, it will leave orphaned entries in the Resource table. There might be other problems as well. – Wyne

Anyone know if this is possible in RM 2015? – Traject

Answer 2

The Process of deletion is little complex in the new Microsoft's Release Management 2013. You need to remove all the dependencies for a particular thing that you are using before deleting.

First You have to delete the Release, the condition for this is that Either the state of the release should be Released or in Cancelled state. This way you can delete the associated Template that is used for that release. You have to change the status of all the releases which are using that template to delete the particular template. After deleting the template which are using particular variables you will be able to delete those variables variables.

Links

The OP is talking about releases, not release templates. – Contemporaneous

There is no way to delete releases with out clearings it's dependencies. But You can do it through a hack in the Release Management database. – Feldman