Team City and Windows, no documentation and not a happy combination

Nothing like Friday morning to inflict more pain and suffering from our continuous integration process. Recently we purchased a gaggle of ReSharper licenses from JetBrains. For whatever reason, the person making the deal decided to buy the bundle that included Team City (apparently it's cheaper to buy the bundle with TC than to buy individual ReSharper licenses, but the logic behind that move escapes me). I've seen Team City in the past and it looked interesting but without a demo you can get your hands on, I didn't give it much thought.

Since it's touted as the "Most Intelligent Integrated Team Environment" I went to try this out as a potential replacement for our CruiseControl.NET setup. Boy, was that a mistake.

The install went pretty smoothly and I tried it out on my laptop with a local setup to start. I have to admit that TC has a nice setup. Install software, open site in browser, start configuring projects. That was kind of the first problem. After the install the system just sat there. I wasn't sure if it was done or not or what I was supposed to do next. I took a look in my Start menu for perhaps a Team City menu with at least a README or something but that was a barren sea of nothingness. Finally I just launched my browser and pointed it to the port I installed TC on and was presented with a screen to enter license information. Aha.

Next was setting up a test project. I didn't want to get into a full blown, download source code task just yet so created a new project that I had a solution file for and found that Team City supported MSBuild. So I just pointed it at the .SLN file hoping it would work. Nope. It complained about some node that it didn't support or some such silly thing. I know .SLN files can be launched with MSBuild (we do that now with CC.NET) but looking at the errors, it appears that TC has some kind of wrapper around MSBuild so I guess it can only support specific types of MSBuild files.

This is where the next problem came up. Documentation. There was no documentation shipped with the product and going online there's only a FAQ with a few gems of wisdom available. There is a forum, but you know what's thats like. Post a message, wait a few days, etc. There are places to submit bugs and questions and the response can be pretty good, but again why isn't there any documentation to get setup? The only documentation there is seems very primitive, as in, it replicates what you see on the screens but really doesn't do a good job on what to do when something goes wrong.

Giving up on the MSBuild configuration to launch a solution file, I changed my test project to something that uses NAnt. That seemed okay but then the agent didn't understand what NAnt was and again I went digging to find out what was needed (besides picking it in the list of build configurations). I stumbled across (on another FAQ pages) that you need to create an environmental variable (in TC) called NAntHome and point it to the root where NAnt is installed. Fair enough. Once I figured out where to put this information (in a config file, hey I thought we don't have to setup config files with TC?) it was able to recognize where NAnt was and could launch my project. Looked good but I didn't set it up to run any tests so it was just doing the build for me.

Next was to get rid of the userid/passwords. Again on the FAQ it says you can change over to NT Authentication and sure enough, on the TC install there's an option to flip it over. You do it and it tells you that you're about to be logged off. No problem. When the page reloads, it's now telling me to create a new Administrator account (which I had already done when it was first setup). However I can't seem to create an account using DOMAIN/USER now using any kind of combination of entries.

I submitted a "HELP ME" message to try to revert back to non-NT authentication and got the response but now I'm stuck. Maybe my concept of "using NT authentication" is flawed (at least for this product). I assume that I can turn it on and users won't have to enter their usernames or password to access the system. If I try to add a user to the system while I have it up in non-NT mode, I could try to enter DOMAIN/USER for the name but password is a mandatory field and I'm certainly not going to enter my password here nor ask other people to give me theirs (or get them to create users for themselves which seems like a silly thing). If I flip it over to NT authentication I'll be at the same place again.

Support wasn't very helpful here. The first response was:

"NT auth enables authentication using users registered on the machine where TeamCity is installed (system users)."

Reading between the lines means I have to add a user manually to the machine from my domain? I tried to clarify what I was looking to accomplish, namely creating new users in TC with NT names. The next response was even less than useful:

"Users are created in the user management on your machine, please refer to your OS documentation for details."

Yeah, right. Of course that's what I'm asking. I like totally asked you how to create users in Windows. Again, no documentation on how this mechanism works or what to do here.

Finally I decided to hook it up to source control and pull down a copy of the system. Another problem is that the current release (1.2) only supports CVS, Subversion, Perforce and VSS. No support for TFS. More Googling and I found a EAP release with TFS support and downloaded it. Now I'm one to go in and just run an installer, but if there's a README file or something (especially telling me about upgrades) I read it in case I need to do anything special. Nope. Not in this case so I just ran the installer.

Now I'm currently looking at a Tomcat screen (their web server for TC) producing an error and lots of Java gobbly-gook in the log file saying a bean can't be created or something. Not a happy camper with the "upgrade". I'm sure I could just blow away the previous version with a full uninstall and install the TFS build, but what if I had real projects configured here? I've submitted a message to the guys with my details and hoping they'll get back to me but it doesn't look very good for this product. Here's the initial response to my submission:

"Passed on to the developers, support team doesn't deal with the EAP versions."

Okay, I can understand that. EAP versions are new(er) and maybe not supported by the main people. Still the response is basically useless to me along with the tool at this point. I'm not even going to both submitting a question about how do I use MSBuild with a solution file. I'm sure the answer will be something like "Configure MSBuild on your server" or some other nonsense.

Team City looks like a great product and I'm sure in the Java world and on a Linux or Mac setup it might be the cats meow. I personally just found it painful to get things to work on Windows and .NET projects. CC.NET isn't a picnic for setting up and adding new projects (compared to Team City) but at least it always works and there is documentation out there and a pattern to doing things. Once you setup one project you can practically setup any other.

Basically someday I would hope to see CC.NET implement some of the things TC does, although I'm sure that's not doable from a competition perspective (free vs $$$). Setting up CC.NET and it's projects can be a pain. I have the process down to a few hours for a new CC.NET setup from scratch (that includes setting up all the tools, downloading, etc.) and new projects can be added in under an hour (less if there's a smart build file in the project). Pulling from Subversion, VSS, and TFS is a no-brainer in CC.NET these days and works flawlessly. There are some GUI tools out there that will edit the CC.NET config file for you, but they're in the embryonic stage and it's easier to just edit the files with Notepad++.

Maybe someone will come up with modification to the CC.NET web dashboard to make it a little smarter like TC and allow you to at least create projects, etc. from it but until that happens we're regimented to editing XML files and such (which isn't a horrible thing).