The Importance of Being There at Conception (of a Feature)
I’ll use a slightly crude example to get across the point of this post. It’s maybe not the best comparison, but bare with me. Instead of “feature” think of “child” in relation to conception.
Let’s say you weren’t there from conception of your child. In fact the first 15 years of the child’s life you missed out on. If you were suddenly brought into the picture, how clean a transition would that be? Would you be able to make up for the lost years? Or have as much impact/bearing in the child’s life as you’d like? It’s a difficult situation. Are you able to connect with the child as well as if you’d been involved since conception?
Don’t Go Breaking My Build
I’ve written another article on the Huddle blog, this time detailing about how to stop the build breaking or at least informing people when it has been broken so it can be fixed quickly. There is a Jabber notification NAnt task we use. I’m working on putting together a NAnt.Util library (pulling together previous tasks I’ve written) that has a whole load of common build functionality. The Jabber stuff should be included in it.
I’ll hopefully be doing another article regarding farming out the build. As ours gets bigger, we need more workers to keep things quick. I’ve been taking a look at Team City and am contemplating moving us across from CruiseControl.Net.
Speeding Up The Build
I’ve written a blog on Huddle about Speeding Up The Build.
It covers a few changes that can be made to help keep your build nice and quick (anything over 60 seconds I would consider slow). Ours is currently at 100 seconds, so we’ve still got some work to do. It’s not bad though considering we have around 40 projects, over a thousand unit tests, css/jss compression, and run aspnet_compiler as a further check.
The Build Process Using CruiseControl.Net & NAnt
CruiseControl.Net
What Is CruiseControl.Net?
- CruiseControl.Net is a free framework for continuous build integration.
- It runs as a Windows service on our build server, watching for changes to our source control system. When it detects a change (ie a developer commits some code) it triggers an action.
- It also comprised of a Web Dashboard, so that build reports (ie the outcome of an action) can be viewed in a browser.
- It’s configured using XML.
- CruiseControl.Net lives on our “Kermit” build server.
Making a Better Developer
I’ve started blogging on Huddle’s blog too, but will keep any articles I write there, linked on this blog.
Making a better developer, an article about how being at Huddle has made me a better developer, and exploring the reasons why.