Continues Integration with Team City

At Netdug last night the subject was continues integration with Team City, so I finally got the opportunity to see a continues integration server in action. As a demonstration the presenter had RoboDojo (created by David Star of Elegant Code) David committed a change to his project to on codeplex and with in a few minutes the project built, ran his tests, etc.

Inspired by this my project tonight was to set up Team City. The Installation was fairly simple, I set up my Sample Project, using the sln2008 builder output to a virtual directory in IIS so I can check the output for both the webforum and webservices. Everything just worked until I tried to get the mstest to run the unit tests. It kept failing to run the unit tests, but didn't tell me.

This bothered be a little, after searching online for a while I couldn't find anything but how to do it with msbuild, or with one of the other builders. Finally after playing around with the setting I found that I could get the mstests to run if I used an older nunit test runner that supported both nunit and msunit, and honestly I really like doing that way I only have one place to add test projects.

So what I was expecting to be a 30-60min project tuned into a 3 hour project, but in the end, it really wasn't that bad, the only major complaint I have now is that Team city is kind of a memory hog (it's written in java, go figure) so I don't think I can really run it on the same box I do development on, but it wasn't designed to.

My eventual goal is to do continues integration at work, but I think that's going to be a hard sell right now, so I'm starting off with built deployments, this way I can show the benefits of doing this, then work on getting continues integration. Now that I have the proof of concept done, I can give a realistic time line on how long it would take to set this up at work.