Deja vu Avec Nant & Continous Integration

Got lucky to try my hand at Continous integration once again.. I remember it has been like more than 5 years now that i had used Nant and CCnet for Continous Integration.

It was fun and challenging to use with the then rustic error messages thrown by both.also configuring the same was also a big pain..
Had asked a developer to get it setup for one of the teams projects as i was aware of the advantages of continous integration. but the developer wasn’t able to get it up and running so finally had to get my hands dirty in CI.

Was surprised to see that even now almost after 4-5 years there is no guide/how to on setting it up and using it completely. even now ppl have to go through the site and exmaples which arent in reality what we look for..

Anyways enuf of cribbing …. ill put up a howto/guide on setting it up soon ,it wont be very soon as am quite tied up with different project releases and process implementation stuff.. but hopefully it should be out by mid Oct !!
Copyright © Shounak Pandit

 

Nant Solution task or nant Exec ??

Had to revert back to exec task of nant and use the Devenv.exe to build the solution as I had some weird assembly referencing problems.

While building the solution it was looking for the references one level above the directory containing the assemblies

couldn’t figure out what the problem was 😦 since I was short on time,had no option but to use the exec task and directly build the project solution, it solved my problem but I still need to figure out a solution to my earlier problem of wrong references

using Devenv solved the problem but not sure if that’s one of the accepted approach and whether I should use an *external exe to build the solution than find a solution to the problem arisen out of using the solution task provide by nant

Am writing an article on howto implement Cruisenet and Nant in continous integration which will include the steps to follow to setup cruisenet and nant on your build server and how to implement the integration.

Hope this article will solve the problems faced by first timers and save a lot of their time from doing R n D 🙂

* By external I mean a .exe out of nant tasks , nant might be internally using Devenv.exe to compile the projects who knows.

 

Nant project is an enterprise template project The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden.

Starting solution build. BUILD FAILED Error checking whether ‘http://localhost/ProjectDirectory/projectname.csproj’

is an enterprise template project. The remote server returned an error:

(403) Forbidden. Total time: 0.3 seconds.

that’s the error that I got when the nant build script tried to build the Web Project I tried out diff stuff but didn’t succeed for quite some time maybe was missing something important,dint know what to do then something struck me, when we define a virtual directory we have diff options.

And one of the important ones there is “script source access” especially in our case as we are trying to access the files in the virtual directory and build them using nant scripts

The reason for this happening is that IIS has a strict access setting for the virtual directories that it hosts and it doesn’t allow any scripts to access the files in the virtual directory’s physical folder and hence the message The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden

one of the way to solve this problem is by checking the option of script source access in the virtual directories properties

Here is the place where you can check the option to allow script access to your code files for getting rid of the Nant forbidden error

 

Nant Solution build Vs Individual build ?

Building the invidiual sub projects first and then referencing the compiled assemly (in build folder ) in the main project turned out to be a bad idea. After completing the build thought of testing (fortunately!! ) it for build success and a build failure.

For the failure I removed a much needed reference (one of the sub projects) from the main project and then checked in the project file and was expecting a build fail email from ccnet (CruiseNet) but was baffled to see a success mail instead.

A little bit of thinking on it got me to the much obvious reasons (was stupid of me not to have foreseen that) the process I was following was of building the sub-projects and pushing the compiled sub project assembly in the build folder and then the project would reference the sub project assembly from the build folder.

The problem was even though I had removed the reference from the main project file, my compiling of the sub project would automatically push the assembly in the build folder

and since we have to hard code the references it would find it and give a successful build even though it was a failure.

moral :- Use a solution task and build the solution instead of individual projects to automatically detect the references in the project.

 

CruiseNet-Nant Build Intro

An important part of any software development

process is getting reliable complete builds out of the code that we

write as that might affect some other developers work or some other

developer may be depending on the correct functioning of your code to complete

his module/task.

Currently am working on build tools to achieve reliable builds or rather, well actually let me put it this way, to detect unreliable/failing builds and warn the developers regarding the same.

Integrating CruiseControl.net & Nant into my project :

Well to start with for the Cruisenet-nant intro :- Cruisenet & Nant are 2 seperate utilities/tools that can be used to make our team leaders/developers life very easy.

Nant is a build tool that can check out the code from the source control server onto the local m/c and build the project.The advantage that we have over here is in case a developer checks in a file but forgets to check in the related reference assembly ,the build will fail due to absence of the assembly. it has many different options like

1. building the project assembly,
2. running the nunit tests , (Nunit is a unit testing tool for .NET http://www.nunit.org/ )
3. FXCop scripts etc (Code analysis tool http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/fxcop/)

which automates most of our need to do stuff after writing any new code especially if we are working in an offshore developement centre or if some other developer is depending on the code.

The features listed above are just the tip of the iceberg Nant is very powerful visit :

http://nant.sourceforge.net/ for more info on nant.

Will soon write up more in detail….