Continuous Integration

For a few days we've been working to get the build server ready. We find it crucial to the entire project that the build and deploy works flawless, also continuous integration is mandatory in an XP project. Currently we test the continuous integration setup with a small template project for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS).

So far we've managed to get Cruise Control.Net to trigger on commits to our Subversion repository. We already do this for our other projects so it was an easy task. What differs is that it also runs all unit tests and later it will also run all the automated acceptance tests.

It was quite nice to see the red/green bars of failed and successful NUnit tests in Cruise Control after a code commit to Subversion.

Before the build was actually working I was worried MOSS would make me install the whole Share point package on to the build server just to build and create a deploy package.

But, no worries, making it build was quite simple I just had to copy Microsoft.SharePoint.dll to our assemblies folder (this is our lib or libraries folder).

Tommy and I paired up to figure out how to use WSPBuilder without the need to install Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) to the build server. According to the WSPBuilder documentation it is required. First time we run WSPBuilder it complained that some assemblies where missing. By adding the -DLLReferencePath parameter referencing our library assemblies for WSPBuilder it was outputting the wsp file we wanted.

Next up is to get the wsp package to install nightly on the test web server. We don't believe we can do deploys every commit as MOSS is not super fast when deploying wsp packages.

Is this wise or not? Would you put the deployment into the continuous builds? Please give us your opinion.