At Readify we (well, one guy mostly) have been building a continuous integration extension for Team Foundation Server. Obviously building a continuous integration extension for Team Foundation Server is pretty straight-forward but what we have done is try to simplify the process by removing the dependency on IIS (but we do rely on .NET 3.0 BETA 2 currently – for WCF).
The other significant feature is that you don’t need to use BisSubscribe.exe, just install the service onto a seperate build server (we don’t recommend putting it onto the same box running the application or data tiers just yet because of the BETA dependency). When the extension starts up (runs as a service) then it will self register with the TFS event notifications service.
We are already using this build internally and it is working great! We still have a few issues we want to address before putting it out there for wider distribution, but it is certainly a functional piece of software. If you want to try it out just leave a comment on this post or shoot me an e-mail directly at mitch.denny@readify.net.
I would like to install it and test it. What are the requirements for the box to install? Framework 3.0? What’s the license? Send me an email or a comment in my blog about it and lets get the ball rolling.
We use microsoft inofficial CI solution for our team builds. Could you perhaps post someting about the differences between the two solutions?
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/ConIntTmFndBld.asp
Hi Igor,
The Microsoft un-official CI solution is quite good, like ours it does the job. Where ours is different is that we are removing the dependency on IIS (but adding one on WCF). The goal with TFS Integrator is to create something that installs easily and is easy to configure. With this test build we have I think we have got about 50% of the way there - we’ve got a number of changes we are making to get us 75% there.
In the future we hope to have an optional web-based front end that allows people to configure the integrator, but it will always be able to be done via a simple configuration file. We do have a second major feature we are adding which I can’t talk about right now, but I think it will help address a big pain in build automation.
Hi Jason,
Check out the following link:
http://notgartner.wordpress.com/2006/09/18/getting-started-with-tfs-integrator/
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