CI for the Manual Build Guy

Speaker: Dennis Palmer

Date: Thursday, November 8, 2012 7:00pm – 8:00pm CST

Location: Paladin Consulting

Does your software delivery process involve more than a single click? Do software packages that were compiled on a developer’s machine ever end up in production? Do you ever skip steps in the build-test-deploy-verify process because they take too long or you just forgot one time because there are a dozen manual steps to follow? Is it difficult for you to roll back to a previous version if you find a serious issue with the version that’s now in production?

Continuous Integration (CI) is a fancy term for an automated process to manage software building, testing and deployment. It’s quite ironic that people who write software all the time to solve other people’s problems fail to take the time to develop a few scripts to make their own lives easier.

I will share my recent experience implementing the TeamCity automated build server for a .NET project and some of the serendipitous benefits we noticed almost right away. (TeamCity is actually written in Java and supports building and deploying just about any type of software.) There were a number of small gotchas, but the payoff has been tremendous. I hope my experience will help and encourage you to add some automation into your life.

I’ll also be demoing TeamCity’s ability to host an internal NuGet (.NET’s package manager) feed, which makes reusing common code libraries across multiple projects a breeze.


View Larger Map