CompiledMonkey.com

Now that we’ve made the switch to Subversion for source control management, we’ve opened the door to a whole new world of tools we can use during our development process. Part of my job is to evaluate these options and find the right way for our group to develop good software efficiently. As with any software project, developers create bugs and developers break builds. Discovering these problems as early as possible helps us fix the issue easily.

The concept of continuous integration is constantly compiling the project and running any unit tests it may have. The results of these tests should be easily accessible to the development team. CruiseControl.NET is a CI tool for the .NET platform that integrates nicely with Subversion. CC.NET also has support for NAnt, an XML based build tool, and NUnit, a framework for unit testing in .NET.

I spent a little time over the last 2 days discovering how these tools work and setting up a CI environment for our projects. So now, whenever we commit a change to source control, CC.NET will detect this commit, build the project, and run the unit tests. The status of this process is cleanly presented on an internal website and even gives us a dashboard view for a quick sanity check across our Subversion repositories.