Chapter 4. Choosing the right CI server
This chapter covers
- CI server basics
- Choosing the right CI server
- Setting up CruiseControl.NET, TeamCity, and TFS Team Build
- Discussing build triggers
- Checking some extended capabilities of CI servers
In chapters 2 and 3, you gathered everything you need to perform full integration in a single repository. You now know how to build everything automatically. You’re fully prepared for continuous integration (CI). You have all the bits and pieces to set up a fully automated process that eventually will build, test, deploy, and analyze an application to help ensure it functions correctly, follows best practices, and is deployable by the customer. It’ll be a process that runs with each source code change and provides immediate feedback to the development team. To accomplish this, you need a CI server.
In this chapter, we’ll give you an overview of what’s on the market today. We’ll look at the Microsoft flagship in this area: Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2010. We’ll also pay close attention to two leaders in the alternative .NET tooling list: Cruise-Control.NET and JetBrains TeamCity. But first, let’s consider how far we are from a full-blown CI process.