Continuous Integraton Learning Process from a .NET developer (Part 2): The Tools
So I've decided on my toolset. It became rather obvious as to what I was going to use as soon as I started looked. I have to also admit that I had looked into CI before so I had a bit of an idea as to what I was going to use. Here's my list:
- CruiseControl.Net
- Subversion
- NAnt
- NUnit (would prefer xUnit, but I’m going to get setup with NUnit first).
So this is where I’m starting and will be the base set of tools. I’m going to probably add NDoc, FxCop and some other tools to the list soon, but wanted to get up and going quickly and the above list is the bare minimum I think.
Subversion and CruiseControl.Net are already installed and working just fine. NAnt, NUnit are on the CI server and ready to go. That was the easy part.
Like I’ve mentioned before I’ve mostly worked alone and inside Visual Studio so the biggest learning curve is coming from writing the build scripts. The XML configuration file for CruiseControl.Net is fairly straight forward. It isn’t the easiest thing I’ve ever done, but I’ve almost got my head around it. The biggest hurdle is writing the NAnt build files. Just a matter of getting my head around it. I’ll try to get some thoughts together as I learn it and post them here. It’s hard to say much while I’m still in the learning process myself.
Let’s talk a bit about CruiseControl.Net Configuration
I’m running cc.net as a Service. I’ve move the ccnet.config into a config subdirectory and added that directory to svn. My first project in the ccnet.config is one that watches the config svn repository for changes. The ccnet.config file is also simplified a bit. I’m putting projects in separate XML files and using entity definitions to include them in the ccnet.config file.
Here’s a sample of what my ccnet.config file looks like:
The cc-config project is used for watching for updates to the config file. I know that cc.net watches for changes to the ccnet.config file itself, but it was ignoring changes to the projectName.xml file. Adding this project seemed to overcome that and will refresh all the projectName.xml files whenever a change is committed to svn.
I’ll get into more detail in the project configuration files in a later post.
