For a while know I have been using CruiseControl.NET for my Continuous Integration setup. It works OK on most occasions, but it seems to get old, no new version for since June last year. I want and expect better interaction and setup experience from a modern tool today.

So along comes TeamCity from JetBrains as a promising new tool, free for three build agents, 20 users and 20 different builds. And for a couple of weeks I have been test driving it. The system itself is built as two parts, the Continuous Integration server and the Build Agents. These need not to be on the same system and you can mix and match Windows and Linux with .NET and Java. It all depends on the build agents. For the test setup I used a server with TeamCity and a build agent on the same machine. The setup is really straightforward, just run the installer and answer a few simple questions. Next up is setting up your project and builds.

There are a few different scenarios I have been working with and to start with the most simple:

Scenario one - build and test:

• Subversion
• Visual studio 2008 solution
• NUnit 2.4.6 unit testing

Well, it couldn't get much easier than this when installing. There are seven steps for each build setup, but not all has to be used. For the basic setup you just point to your subversion repository and select a project folder to checkout into.

Then you select the solution files, set the unit test to the correct version and specify the test assemblies for example **/*.test.dll. Don't forget to unselect the tests in the */obj/ folders, there is a special setting for this as well **/obj/*.test.dll would do the trick.

Last thing was to set the build triggers, I just went along with 60s delayed check in build, then you can also trigger time scheduled builds (good for integration testing and deployment).

Actually it is that simple, no bloated config files to go through. Just make sure the correct version of .NET framework is in place. I had an early beta of 3.5 in place and it took me a while to figure that out.

So for the client then? Is there a tray icon and stuff? Sure is, on the server, set up the users that should access TeamCity, and the access level. When you login you have your settings, and there you will find plugins for Eclipse and Visual Studio (will link to the code from the site and show the tests and your modifications) as well as a tray icon.

What's next?

The second scenario, build, test, and coverage was trickier, when adding the coverage part. Being on .NET there aren't that many free coverage tools. The only viable one is the old NCover 1.5.8 version. This is sad, $149 is a bit steep but it's ok in the right project. But I certainly don't want to pony up $299.00 just to get 64bit support. Supposedly the pro version don't support 64bit. There is a coverage tool called PartCover but it seems to be dead since August 2007, and there is too little information about it.

The third scenario was one that I didn't quite get around to. This was to use the build in Visual Studio Team System Developer support with Microsoft test and coverage. These are good when you run it in your environment and it would be great to have it running in TeamCity.

I will get to the second and third scenarios in upcoming blog posts.