Trying out Team City - Looks Promising!

I've been looking both at CI Factory by Jay Flowers, and Team City by JetBrains lately. this has to do with the fact that at Typemock we currently have a Continuous Integration solution that is largely based on CruiseControl.NET and MSBuild files.

It sucks.

The MSBuild files are hardly maintainable and the logic for running the build, signing things, obfuscating, licensing, installation, 64 bit versions and more - it's chaos, held by some gum and a couple of strings. Not unlike many other builds I've seen.

We're in the process of moving the builds into FinalBuilder, but I'm also looking for a better CC.NET. CI Factory looks nice in that it is very simple to setup but still requires messing around with MSBuild targets and the like to make your builds work with it.

TeamCity looks very promising. I read this blog post from Elutian about their experience with Team City and wondered what it would be like to work with it against a FinalBuilder script. I installed TeamCity and ran it against SVN and FinalBuilder (like it would run at Typemock) and got it all working in less than 20 minutes. Pretty snazzy and no XML tampering needed to take place, Thank the gods.

The killer feature in Team City?

Delayed Commit(also known as private build). It allows you to run the full build with tests on the server as if you checked in all your changes, but without actually checking in your changes until the build is successful, so you will know if you're about to break the build before you actually break it.

So, I'm thinking, with team city's professional license being free for up to 20 developers and 3 build agents, that we'll give it a shot at Typemock HQ and see what happens.

Published Friday, January 18, 2008 7:36 PM by RoyOsherove
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Comments

Friday, January 18, 2008 10:14 PM by Kevin McDonnell

# re: Trying out Team City - Looks Promising!

The excitement of being able to install and to set up new builds with unit tests in less than an hour was fantastic. Unfortunately it's been tempered slightly by the lack of C# code coverage. Anyone been able to get that working

Saturday, January 19, 2008 2:56 AM by Sergey Pashin

# re: Trying out Team City - Looks Promising!

Roy,

You might want to take a stab at our <a href="www.viewtier.com/.../a>. Its killer feature is practically unbreakable scheduled builds. With Parabuild your scheduled builds will be successful even if the head of the codebase is broken.

Sergey Pashin

Saturday, January 19, 2008 5:00 AM by RoyOsherove

# re: Trying out Team City - Looks Promising!

Kevin : That's why I'm calling Finaluilder from within TeamCity. FB is where I doo all the complex work. TeacmCity is just a nice wrapper and trigger mechanism around it with nice statiscitcs, delayed commits and so on.

Saturday, January 19, 2008 8:42 AM by Jonathan Parker

# re: Trying out Team City - Looks Promising!

I'm glad this basic feature is at last starting to take hold. I think the next basic CI feature would be automatic notifications of people checking in code that you have modified. That way you can do an update while you're working instead of just before you check in. That will reduce the chance of checking in after someone else which happens all to often.

Of course you could always have a system where you only check into the branch and then if the build succeeds it gets checked into the trunk. Then you would still have a record of the broken builds for the purpose of backup where someone makes significant changes that aren't complete but still need to be kept and possibly fixed by someone else.

Saturday, January 19, 2008 9:06 PM by Ngu Soon Hui

# re: Trying out Team City - Looks Promising!

You may want to try Automated Build Studio-- we use it for over two years and we like it a lot

Sunday, January 20, 2008 9:24 AM by Thomas Huijer

# FinalBuilder: mijn favoriete deployment tool

Voor iedereen die het nog niet kent: FinalBuilder is wat mij betreft zonder enige twijfel de beste deployment

Monday, January 21, 2008 8:42 AM by Elizaveta Revyakina

# re: Trying out Team City - Looks Promising!

Hello Roy,

Thank you for such a positive feedback. We are really glad to know our efforts were not in vain.

TeamCity development team

Monday, January 21, 2008 12:16 PM by Jay Flowers

# re: Trying out Team City - Looks Promising!

Hi Roy,

Hmm, I can think of no situation in which CI Factory would ever put you in a position of having to mess with MSBuild targets.  If you want to use Final Builder CI Factory supports that choice.

What made you think you needed to mess with MSBuild targets?

Smiles,

Jay

Friday, February 01, 2008 5:30 PM by Dennis van der Stelt

# re: Trying out Team City - Looks Promising!

Roy, FinalBuilder isn't in the list of supported build runners. I haven't downloaded TeamCity yet, but is it possible to run FinalBuilder from TeamCity?

Friday, February 01, 2008 7:46 PM by RoyOsherove

# re: Trying out Team City - Looks Promising!

Dennis: I was able to run it very easily by using a command line call to Fbcmd.exe and it works great here at Typemock.

Saturday, February 16, 2008 4:11 AM by Scott Bateman

# re: Trying out Team City - Looks Promising!

Thanks for the feedback, all.  I am going to give TeamSite a try with some new stuff that I am working on.  I am a long-time CCNet user and advocate, so I know what I do and do not like about it.  Hopefully the bad will be fixed without losing any of the good :)

Saturday, February 16, 2008 4:14 AM by TeamCity - A Better CCNet? « Code Slammer

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