I am so stoked I looked at
Phil Haack's Blog today. I noticed an article about SubText using Cruise Control for their open source development process. I had never heard of CruiseControl and didnt realize it was open source. I quickly hopped to sourceforge and downloaded the latest source. I noticed from the documentation that CCNet was 2.0 compatable. Within minutes I was fighting with VS 2005 to make it work on 2.0.
I had to first edit the csproj file to force a WAP type conversion and everything was easy from there. I really like how the source is laid out in its various projects and components. The Web Dashboard component can be a huge option in controling your build process in Agile development. It works well with open source projects with dispersed developers and supports most used source control vaults. You have to delve into the documentation to realize the raw power of this.
I plan to not only use this to make weekly builds with rainbow but in all my projects. I also would like to integrate this with rainbow as a module in which clients would then have the option to add a Cruise Control Dashboard to their Rainbow Portal .NET 2.0 framework. I also noticed that membership could be greatly used with developer features such as user actions [ a user to deploy, a user to build, etc]. This will also work well with rainbow's integration with ASPNETDB in our next release. Other things to note where Ajax areas. I deployed MagicAjax in minutes and now have ajax functionality. The best thing about MA, is all I have to do is replace the dll and thats the upgrade as the project matures.
Below is a screen shot of my configuration to manage Rainbow. Take note that Im still a beginner and still compiling my own version of the Server [ oh yes, there is more than just a web dashboard] to manage my local IIS. After that, I can manage the build process of multiple applications across multiple source Vaults. Did I mention I want to integrate this into rainbow??
Every project Ive ever worked on has always had issues with deployment [ not to mention source control]. One of my friends came up with a great php system; however Ive always wanted a .NET one. I finally found one on source forge that I checked out and its pretty impressive. I am a strong believer of at the bear minimum : dev to stage to production. If you also follow at least this system, you know the woes of copying files from each location and solving issues with accidental deployments. Wouldnt it be nice if I could have one web app to control all my applications deployments? This is what I plan to use Npublisher not only in my projects but as a module in rainbow.
Npublisher, a web application deployment system by
Ting Huang , can solve most of small application deployment needs. It can even login to VSS and deploy code to multiple servers in asychronous processes as to not hold up the web application itself with file tasks. Another piece of funtionality I enjoy is the warm up feature. It seems that this feature can warm up actual web applications just by giving the url. This is pretty nice[neat] functionality and can make a deployment manager's job simple. I couldnt find a 2.0 version so I created my own. A screen shot is provided below.
With my first entry on GWB, I would just like to introduce myself. My name is Eric Ramseur and I am a .NET Consultant. I have played a couple hats but my biggest interest is Software Architecture. Currently, I am the Rainbow Portal 2.0 Admin. For those of you who do not know about our project please visit
us Rainbow Portal is a portal project based off Ibuyspy. My main responsibilities are to lead the .NET 2.0 framework version and organization.
Enough about rainbow. I also like to integrate applications and improve them. I have ported a number of 1.1 applications to the 2.0 framework [ including Rainbow] and am currently on a couple open source projects because of this reason. I think this is where I can best serve the community. Ill do my best to post 2.0 best practices as I find them out myself. I am a firm believer of teaching and the best way is to go through it yourself and then immediatly teach someone else. Only by teaching someone else do you really teach yourself.
Thanks for tuning in and my next blog will be on a .NET 2.0 Deployment system review.