Continuous Integration in .NET: From Theory to Practice 2nd Edition

NOTE: This is a repost of on old post as I am moving onto the Blogger platform


During last year I created a guide on implementing Continuous Integration (CI) for a .NET 2.0 development environment.  The guide illustrates how to create a complete CI setup using VS 2005 and MSBuild (no NAnt) together with tools like FxCop, NCover, TypeMock, NUnit, Subversion, InstallShield, QTP, NDepend, Sandcastle and CruiseControl.NET.  The good news is that I spend some time during the last 2 weeks greatly improving the setup for use on a new VS 2008 project and I have decided to release a 2nd Edition of the guide covering the much improved setup.  Instead of creating another series of blog posts to cover the content, I'm releasing the 2nd edition only as a downloadable PDF guide together with all the associated code and build artefacts.  This will allow new teams to get up and running with CI a lot quicker.

For readers of the first edition of the guide, the most notable differences between the second edition and the first edition of the guide are:

1. Updated to use VS 2008, .NET 3.5 and MSBuild 3.5 (including new MSBuild features like parallel builds and multi-targeting).
2. All tools (NUnit, NDepend, NCover etc.) are now stored in a separate Tools folder and kept under source control. The only development tools a developer needs to install are VS 2008, SQL Server 2005 and Subversion. The rest of the tools are retrieved form the mainline along with the latest version of the source code.
3. Added the CruiseControl.NET configuration (custom style sheets, server setup etc.) to source control and created a single step setup process for the build server. This greatly simplifies the process of setting up a new build server.
4. Changed from using InstallShield to Windows Installer XML (WiX) for creating a Windows installer (msi).
5. Added support for running MbUnit tests in addition to the NUnit tests.
6. Added support for running standalone FxCop in addition to running VS 2008 Managed Code Analysis.
7. Added targets to test the install and uninstall of the Windows installer created.
8. Consolidated the CodeDocumentationBuild to become part of the DeploymentBuild.
9. Removed the QTP integration as this was not a requirement for the new project. If you want to integrate QTP, please refer to the QtpBuild of the first edition of the guide.
10. Used the latest version of all the tools available.  The tools used in the guide are VS 2008, Subversion, CruiseControl.NET, MSBuild, MSBuild.Community.Tasks, NUnit/MbUnit, FxCop, TypeMock/Rhino.Mocks, WiX, Sandcastle, NCover, NCoverExplorer and NDepend.

I hope you find it to be a useful resource for assisting you with creating your own CI process by harnessing the power of MSBuild!  If you have any questions, additional remarks or any suggestions, feel free to drop me a comment.

Download

Here are the links:

1. PDF Guide
2. Code and Build artifacts