Tuesday, 8 August 2006 13:00 by
nickpOur team adopted a continuous integration server a little over a month ago and we have been very happy with the results since. We were using Visual Source Safe as our source repository and CC.NET for a continuous integration server. A special "builder" account was created in VSS for CC.NET to pull down the source for each project it had registered. Our projects are set to trigger within CC.NET every 15 minutes. Over time, as we added more projects, CC.NET would report a failed build sporadically. The build error alluded to a VSS user specific log file that was inaccessible during the period of time CC.NET would try to access the repository. This file was locked during a parallel/previous build by VSS - this is a known issue and has been discussed on the CC.NET forums. All-the-while, we continued to have various issues with VSS that would cause us to reboot the repository server from time to time - totally unacceptable in my eyes. It was time for a better source control system to step up to bat, welcome Subversion to the team. I have been using Subversion for a while for personal projects, but as of Friday last week we have migrated our repository from VSS and our entire team is now using Subversion. Our CC.NET is running much smoother now, in fact we haven't had any issues as of yet. We are using AnkhSVN for Visual Studio integration and TortoiseSVN for integration within the Windows shell. I can gladly say goodbye to pessimistic locking for good now.
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Tuesday, 25 July 2006 17:27 by
nickpIt's very important to keep your build time as short as possible, but everyone has to deal with it one way or another. If you enjoy anagrams, try waitingforbuild.com next time you are waiting for your build process to complete. On a serious note, if your build time is extremely long (can you eat lunch during your build?) then the next step is to shorten your build time to increase the feedback loop within your development team. The longer your feedback loop is among the development team, the longer it will take to fix bugs when they are identified. A common area where this occurs is where integration tests are used within the smoke test suite. By the nature of integration tests, they tend to take much longer than simple unit tests. Integration tests require outside resources such as a network or database, all which take time to run - assuming they are all available during the run. Remember, if your unit test requires a network resource, file or database connection, it is not truely a unit test. There is nothing wrong with having these types of tests available to be run, however using those within a smoke testing suite can produce inconsistent results that may be misleading. Thoughts?
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Tuesday, 18 July 2006 21:08 by
nickpFor anyone who has done Java development, you know the first-class tool support that IntelliJ provides for the Java developer. Luckily, JetBrains has entered the Microsoft space with the Visual Studio add-in for C# called ReSharper. This provides a multitude of productivity enhancing features for both C# and ASP.NET. JetBrains just announced a new product called TeamCity which is targeted at providing productivity enhancements to the development team as a whole. With features such as supporting continuous integration, delayed commit, build management, static code analysis and a web-based project dashboard it appears that Team System will have another competitor in the enterprise market space. On a slightly related side note, I was informed that with the next release of ReSharper, which is due out at the end of the year, they will provide support for VB.NET. For those that are interested, there is a TeamCity Early Access Program located here.
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Sunday, 22 January 2006 16:30 by
nickpFor those of you using CruiseControl.NET, and in particular the CCTray tool, here is a great link for audio sounds for your various build results. Does anyone have any favorites?
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