Apr
24
2009
It has been the buzz for quite some time now, Continuous Integration (CI). If you haven’t heard of it, I will be surprised if you are reading this. But nonetheless, good for you!
The benefits of CI are bountiful, and transcends successful software development methodologies. The best of the best development shops implement some sort of CI system, some barebones and some implementing a plethora of tools and programs to monitor and analyze progress, quality, and stability.
As far as myself and CI, I have been using CI Factory for some time now as my Continuous Integration Server, over a year now, and have truly enjoyed it. Still, as always learning. Talk about gaining perspective on your development efforts. This appreciation rises on multiple levels. Integration with Subversion, NCover code coverage analysis, NDepend dependency analysis, Simian similarity analyzer, and several other great code analysis plug-ins.
A little over a month ago I decided it was time to saddle up and hop on the JetBrains TeamCity CI server train and check out what it had to offer my development efforts. There has been a lot of buzz around the dev community about TeamCity, and there are several articles/ posts out there about integration visa-vi NCover, NDepend, and Simian. Problem there is, many of these blog posts and articles are outdated. One example done well was Laurent Kempé’s series on his TeamCity implementation for his Tech Head Brothers Portal. It was only a year ago, but since then, several products have had updated releases, for example, NCover to version 3.0 which has so many breaking changes it is unbelievable.
So, all that being said, I wanted to spend some time whaling through my experiences with the TeamCity Continuous Integration server, and configuring your typical unit testing, code coverage, and code analysis tools I have benefited from using. Over the course of the next month, I will be writing a series on TeamCity and how I leveraged the tool to meet my needs and how you can too!
It is very easy to implement, and with little to no experience with MSBuild you can be up and running in no time. I do however recommend a cool precursor to my series and check out Rob Conery’s recent post on CI and Unit Testing using TeamCity and xUnit.net. He does a great 10,000 level elevation tour of TeamCity and getting it …There are several others out there who also do a splendid job implementing TeamCity as well, and I recommend checking them out. Also, JetBrains does a very good job of documenting their stuff as well.
Here is a run down of the series objectives;
- Simple Configuring MSBuild for TeamCity
- Getting MBUnit to play nice with TeamCity
- Code Coverage (with NCover 3.0, but the fact that $650 bones is steep for many, suggestions welcome! Looking at PartCover)
- TeamCity NDepend integration
- Simian similarity analysis TeamCity Integration
- FxCop Code Conformance Analysis
So, i hope you enjoy my series…