Choosing the right CI server in Visual C#

Creation Denso QR Bar Code in Visual C# Choosing the right CI server

If you decided not to write your own CI server, you made the right decision. But now you have to decide which server to use. You have a lot of options to choose from. Several CI servers are on the market, and if you want to choose wisely, you must consider many aspects, such as the following:

How much money do you have to spend Do you want to pay the angle-bracket tax (write a lot of XML) Does it support the other tools you need How good are the documentation and support Does it do what you want it to do Does it do more than you need, not just now but into the future Is it easy to use Is it cool and hip

Before we go into details, let s take a broader look at the tools available. Programs and scripts that performed a task similar to a CI server existed for a long time. For example, they were used in the Linux community for kernel development (see http://test.kernel.org/tko/). But the era of CI servers started with CruiseControl in 2000 or 2001. It s a tool from ThoughtWorks, and it emerged about the same time as the first article about CI from Martin Fowler, who works at ThoughtWorks. CruiseControl is a Java-based tool for performing continuous builds. It s widely adopted mainly in the Java community. It has a pluggable architecture and supports a wide range of source control systems. The build for CruiseControl is usually made using Ant as the build tool. The first CI server aimed at the .NET community was CruiseControl.NET (CCNet). It s a form of the old CruiseControl made by ThoughtWorks, and it s been on the market since 2003. It has everything the older brother has, and it s written in .NET. It works as a Windows service and has a web dashboard to present the current state. It can remotely manage the process using a system tray program called CCTray. Just like CruiseControl, CCNet is open source. CCNet was for years the automated integration server of choice for .NET teams that didn t have enough resources for commercial products, especially for Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS). As we mentioned in chapter 2, TFS is a suite of tools that supports collaborative software development. One of its features is the ability to perform CI builds. Somewhere in between the totally free model of CCNet and the rather expensive model of TFS is another important player in the .NET CI server market: TeamCity from JetBrains, which was first released in 2006. The licensing scenario for TeamCity is a hybrid between free and propriety. You can start small without paying a penny for the Professional Edition license; but if you grow, and your needs expand, then you ll have to pay for the license. It s written in Java, is easy to set up, and has a few features that make it interesting to look at.

These three tools aren t all the CI servers you can use in .NET. You can also consider adopting Hudson, Bamboo, Electric Cloud, Anthill, or one of many others. A detailed CI feature matrix is available at ThoughtWorks wiki page (http://confluence. public.thoughtworks.org/display/CC/CI+Feature+Matrix). We ll look at these three players from our point of view. Earlier in this section, we listed some aspects to consider when choosing a CI server. Table 4.1 compares our three server choices on those aspects.

Table 4.1 CI server matrix that compares the features of three CI servers Aspect Cost XML Tools support Documentation CI functionality Additional features Easy to use Cool (subjective) CruiseControl.NET yes no yes yes yes no no somewhat TFS 2010 somewhat yes somewhat yes yes yes somewhat somewhat TeamCity somewhat yes yes yes yes yes yes yes

When we were planning this book, we initially discussed going with CCNet. Our original goal was to provide you with all the information you needed to get up and running with no or little cost. We soon found that TeamCity was gaining a lot of interest from .NET developers, so we added it, knowing there would eventually be some cost to you. At that time, TFS was costly, so we ruled it out. But when Microsoft announced that TFS 2010 would be available at no extra cost to everyone with an MSDN Professional subscription or above, we knew it had to be included. We could have discussed other CI servers, but at some point, it would have been too many, and the book would have lost focus. We feel that with the CI servers we ve selected, we meet our goal of no or little cost. Now, let s start digging in to each server, beginning with CCNet.