For example, I'm working in a JavaScript project and I have split what is ment to be a single file into multiple files to ease the development process. Now is there some kind of tool/process that would let me join this and maybe compress into a new single file automatically or as part of a build process?
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I have a solution with multiple web-projects and many class libraries.
I want to deploy web-projects to my own VM with installed deployment agents.
Should I create for every web-project separate its own Build and Release Definitions, right?
Obviously, creating separate Build and Release definition for each web project works. But if you want to use one build & release definition, it also can be achieved, and there are many ways.
For example, if you want to use each project artifact, you could use individual project files in the solution to build in Build definition. Or you could copy the file you need for one project in Release definition, etc. In a word, it depends on how do you want to achieve your requirement.
I am just starting to use Nant and have a quick question -
When using Nant with a ASP.NET web application, where is the recommended place to put the build file? Should it be part of the web project or should it be just directly under the solution? Am I over thinking this?
I recommend you to place your build file along with the whole project. You also should create a separate directory for this build file (e.g. named Build), because in future you will have to create one more build (or .include) file and one more and then you will have a set of build files that should be grouped.
I have been working on a build script for a website that we have. The website is a classic asp web app with an asp.net website in a folder of the classic asp web app.
We have different versions of the global.asa that need to be substituted instead of different web configs. We are in the process of moving to a continuous integration environment so much of this still new to me. I've written a build script that performs the following tasks.
Cleans the buildartifacts directory if it exists.
Builds the solution file with whatever configuration is passed in. This produces output with each project in a separate folder.
Copies the files into the required folder structure.
Packages up the result using MSDeploy as sync.
My first problem is this ...
When I run the MSBuild task like so ...
<MSBuild Projects="$(SolutionFileName)"
Properties="Configuration=$(Configuration);OutDir=%(BuildArtifacts.FullPath)" />
It builds the web app but does not apply any transformations. I would have assumed that MSBuild would apply the transforms automatically. Instead I end up with all 3 config files in the output folder that contains the build. Why is this? I've done some searching here, and here and they are using a separate task to perform the transformation. IF Visual Studio can apply the transforms and Visual Studio uses MSBuild I would think that MSBuild could apply transfromations? Isn't MSBuild configuration aware? Also if I have to do it separately, can I perform all transformations at once, if there are multiple config files in multiple folders at each level of the folder structure.
My second problem is ... being a classic asp web app we can't really use config files for this part of it because ... well I'm not sure how the classic asp web app would access the config file? So we have different versions of the global.asa file that would normally get replaced manually. I suppose I could do some sort of search / copy the specific asa files that we require at that time, but is there a way to perhaps use transformations to do this task?
Maybe this is not exactly what you need. I'm using XmlPreprocess tool for config files manipulation. I'm using one mapping file for multiple environments. You can edit mapping file by Excel. It is very easy to use.
You can call it from MSBuild script using Exec task.
Regarding the issue of transformations ... once we sorted out deployment with msdeploy we found out that msdeploy will actually perform the transformations on deployment. It stores the transformation data in one of the xml files that get created with the package.
I'd like to offer my .Net library (which I'm developing in the SharpDevelop IDE) as a single dll. I've been manually using ILMerge to merge my compiled library and all its reference libraries together, but would like this done automatically.
I'd ideally like to have this automatic merge happen from within SharpDevelop, without having to set up an external build script. Is this possible?
SharpDevelop uses MSBuild to compile your code so the simplest way would be to create a post build step that runs ILMerge with the correct parameters. You can create a post build step from the Project Options under the Build Events tab. Alternatively you can directly edit your project file in Notepad.
In my automated NAnt build we have a step that generates a lot of code off of the database (using SubSonic) and the code is separated into folders that match the schema name in the database. For example:
/generated-code
/dbo
SomeTable.cs
OtherTable.cs
/abc
Customer.cs
Order.cs
The schema names are there to isolate the generated classes that an app will need. For example, there is an ABC app, that will pull in the generated code from this central folder. I'm doing that on a pre-build event, like this:
del /F /Q $(ProjectDir)Entities\generated*.cs
copy $(ProjectDir)....\generated-code\abc*.cs $(ProjectDir)Entities\generated*.cs
So on every build, the Nant script runs the generator which puts all the code into a central holding place, then it kicks off the solution build... which includes pre-build events for each of the projects that need their generated classes.
So here's the friction I'm seeing:
1) Each new app needs to setup this pre-build event. It kind of sucks to have to do this.
2) In our build server we don't generate code, so I actually have an IF $(ConfigurationName) == "Debug" before each of those commands, so it doens't happen for release builds
3) Sometimes the commands fail, which fails our local build. It will fail if:
- there is no generated code yet (just setting up a new project, no database yet)
- there is no existing code in the directory (first build)
usually these are minor fixes and we've just hacked our way to getting a new project or a new machine up and running with the build, but it's preventing me from my 1-click-build Nirvana.
So I'd like to hear suggestions on how to improve this where it's a bit more durable. Maybe move the copying of the code into the application folders into the NAnt script? This seems kind of backwards to me, but I'm willing to listen to arguments for it.
OK, fire away :)
How often does your DB schema change? Wouldn't it be possible to generate the database-related files on demand (e.g. when the schema changes) and then check them into your code repository?
If your database schema doesn't change, you can also package the compiled *.cs classes and distribute the archive to other projects.
We have two projects in our solution that are built completely out of generated code. Basically, we run the code generator .exe as a post-build step for another project and along with generating the code, it automates the active instance of visual studio to make sure that the generated project is in the solution, that it has all of the generated code files, and that they are checked out/added to TFS as necessary.
It very rarely flakes out during the VS automation stage, and we have to run it "by hand" but that's usually only if you have several instances of VS open with >1 instance of the solution open and it can't figure out which one it's supposed to automate.
Our solution and process are such that the generation should always be done and correct before our auto-build gets to it, so this approach might not work for you.
Yeah I'd like to take VS out of the equation so that a build from VS is just simply compiling the code and references.
I can manage the NAnt script... I'm just wondering if people have advice around having 1 NAnt script, or possibly one for each project which can push the code into the projects rather than being pulled.
This does mean that you have to opt-in to generate code.