SourceVault and CruiseControl.NET

For a recent project we had to discard Visual Source Safe for source control because we needed remote access to our build system. Previously we've been using SourceGears Source Off Site to access VSS, but this time we noticed that SourceGear had a pricing model that made their SQL Server based source control system Vault a cheaper option. In the process we also considered moving to CVS which was available internally, but discarded it due to the developers incompetence (myself included) on the subject.

Blessed with a non-filesystem based source control we set up our buildserver with the latest version of CruiseControl.NET. At first we tried the 0.8 release, but soon figured out that we had to use the latest build of ccnet instead which so far seems stable.

Using Vault was about a day of getting used to (from a VSS perspective) but somewhat disappointing when it came to ccnet integration. No longer did we have the autoGetSource feature, so a bootstrap buildfile was required. The bootstrap was nicked off the ccnet site, but does not properly handle labels with vault. Also it seems to be a bit slow when using the commandline vault.exe and their GET method from the repository. The licensing model of Vault also require us to purchase an additional license for the buildserver if we don't want one of the dev accounts to do the gettin'.

I emailed SourceGear asking for their contribution to the CruiseControl.NET project and today I got a positive response. According to SourceGear they are currently contributing to both ccnet and Draco.NET opensource initiatives. Unfortunately they cannot provide any dates for an upcoming integration but states that "progress is beeing made". I've challenged them to come up with a release date, and hopefully anyone using ccnet with SourceGears' Vault will do the same!