CI Factory

I tried to get CI Factory to work on my project, but I found some problems...

To help setup me project, I followed this very nice show on dnrTV by Scott Hanselman and Jay Flowers.

Problems encountered:

• Using VSS and not having my project on the root of the source control
• Not using WinRAR
  

For the first problem, I had to hack into Properties.xml and SourceControl.Target.xml under Packages/VisualSourceSafe folder to add a new properties with the full path under VSS.

For the second problem, I hacked into a lot of files to replace WinRAR with 7Zip. As 7Zip has a peculiar way to create SFX files, I had to create 3 batch files to help 7Zip do the task.

After a lot of testing, the project finally build!

But when I say "the project", I should have said "the project skeleton". Without my source code, I'm already worth almost 30MB on disk... no code, only build scripts and support tools. And only Simian!

Problems:

• you get lots of trash on your source control (build scripts is one thing but the binaries of nAnt, Simian, etc, is a bit overkill)
• the project structure looks a little messy
• you have one CCNet server for every project
• you have lots os replicated things across projects

I decided to quit CI Factory. I think it is too complicated to maintain. There are loads of third party tools to watch out, and you have to change a lot if you already have some projects going.

In a future post, I'll write about our CCNet.

PS: if you want to see the changes I made to CI Factory, drop me a line.

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