Continuous Integration

NStub, finished before it ever really started...

Tony Yates — Sun, 13 May 2007 21:06:09 GMT

The creator of NStub, Jeremy Jarrell (sometimes referred to his blog handle: Digital Blasphemy), has just announce that NStub Beta 2 has been released. Unfortunately, he also says that that will not be any more effort going into that project. Thats too bad because its a cool idea! Expecially for lazy-ass programmers! Then again, it does kind of go against the point of TDD - write tests first, then code. Oh well... :-(

WiX, Creating Intallation Files Without VStudio

Tony Yates — Thu, 10 May 2007 07:01:44 GMT

Windows Installer XML (WiX), an open source initiative, looks like its the best solution to automate installation program builds (MSI files) without the need for Visual Studio. This is great news for those using an Continuous Integration (CI) environment. For those few that read this, you may have read my previous post about my CI setup. WiX, I think, is going to nicely fit in there!

Here are a couple links to get started:

The WiX site on sourceforge.

A good overview and thorough tutorial how to use WiX.

I'll eventually blog about my WiX experiences, but first I'll have to convert one of my current projects over.

See you next time!

Continuous Integration, Finally!!!

Tony Yates — Sun, 06 May 2007 22:21:11 GMT

Automation is a wonderful thing!

I recently got my CI environment up and running on my personal development machine. I've installed and configured the usual suspects: CruiseControl.Net, NAnt, MSBuild, NUnit, and Subversion.

One this I see a lot of people talk about is installing Apache to host a site, like TRAC, to view the source in the Subversion repository, but I've opted out of that. I have no desire to view source on my build server, as that will all be done on the machine I develop on, and no inclination to install Apache on an otherwise stable server .

I think its wonderful that when I upload source changes to the repository, CC.Net will see those changes and begin the process of downloading the latest source to a working directory, call off MSBuild which builds the project and then runs unit testing, and then writes out reports for each process. So far I've only configured one project in CC.Net, and for that I am using MSBuild. It works great. It feels like I have another person right there, working for me, 24 hours a day! I have doubts that I'll ever really need NAnt, but have it just incase I want to try something crazy!

No matter if you are a 9-5 developer, or everyday code-monkey, you really should check out having a CI setup somewhere within your environment. Once its configured, its worth the time invested to learn about each step 1000-fold!