From my perspective, we're constructing our own 'flavour' of NAnt/Ivy/CruiseControl.Net in-house and can't help but get the feeling that other dev shops are doing exactly the same work, but then everybody is finding out the same problems and pitfalls with it.
I'm not complaining about NAnt, Ivy or CruiseControl at all, as they've been brilliant in helping our team of developers become more sure of the quality of their code, but it just seems strange that these tools are very popular, yet we're all re-inventing the CI-wheel.
Is there a pre-made solution for building .Net applications, using the tools mentioned above?
Continuous integration tools are usually focussed purely on the monitoring / running aspect of continuous integration - i.e. they monitor the repository and kick of a build when something is checked in. The trick to making this successful is to create automated builds that are easy to maintain and extend - rake is probably a better choice for this than nant due to the expressiveness of ruby, but you can achieve the same with nant if you take care.
TeamCity is probably the simplest and fastest CI server to set up and get running and definitely beats the pants of CC.
Hudson was another product that came up a lot when I was researching which CI server to use, but as I chose TeamCity and have never used Hudson I can't really compare the 2.
Have a look at Hudson
There's CI Factory, but it's always been a single developer pulling pieces together into a whole, and it looks like it has taken a side jog out of .NET-land into Java-land.
Related
We're a little aghast at how time consuming it is to develop syntactically correct ARM templates from scratch.
The Portal helps, but pushes out non-development ready templates (pretty hard to find what the bug is when all the templates use 'name' for the resource name, versus maybe something more verbose like ('microsoftStorageAccountResourceName', microsoftStorageAccountResourceLocation, microsoftStorageAccountResourceTags, etc.).
We understand that there are many ways to deploy -- but if at all possible, we'd like some assurances that ARM is the current preferred way and will continue to be the preferred primary means of scripting deployments via VSTS -- or is it sliding towards a different -- maybe more programmatic -- approach (eg: Powershell, CLI, other).
We're asking this because it looks like we will have to invest significant effort to create a resource library for this organisation (to decrease the need for all projects to become proficient at ARM deployment) -- and would prefer to do it using an approach that will be preferred by developers over the coming years, for maintainability objectives.
Thanks for any insight on which approach to recommend as the best investment.
Templates are going to be around for the foreseeable future... it really depends on whether you want to orchestrate the deployment yourself (imperative deployments using CLI, PS, SDK) or you want ARM to orchestrate the deployment (via templates). Happy to chat in offline if you want to discuss more - email bmoore at microsoft.
Writing this now one year after the original post: The answer to 'ARM Templates are still the preferred deployment mechanism?' probably depends on who you ask. "Preferred" by Microsoft according to their product strategy may be meant differently than preferred by actual users that, well, feel the pain of vendor strategy decisions. I had started with an Azure automation book that used PS scripting only; I was lead (maybe mis-lead?) then to the ARM Template deployment model, mainly by the Microsoft web documentations, but found out that those templates need so much rework that writing a PS script, or even writing an ARM Template from scratch, seems to be a more efficient way to go. In fact, I am confused at the moment about what the 'Best Practice' is, i.e. what method other developers actually use. Is there a community-established opinion on this matter, now in August 2019? Or is it all VSTS / 3rd-party IDEs nowadays?
We are in search of an automated testing tool for our project. As we are in testing department we prefer a tool which would have less programming in it. Please suggest some tools for us .Till now we are testing our application manually.
Our project is being developed in Java.
Is there any freeware tool that I could use or is it better to go for a paid tool?
Thanks in Advance.
Less programming? You'll need something like JUnit to write unit tests if you want to do serious regression testing, but unit tests require you to write some code
Here's a big list of open-source testing tools, some of them may offer what you want: http://java-source.net/open-source/testing-tools/junit
For example, T2 claims to be a random testing tool. As one, it is fully automatic, but one must keep in mind that the code coverage of random testing is in general very limited. It should be used as a complement to other testing methods. T2 checks for internal errors, run time exceptions, method specifications, and class invariant.
Not sure if you mean a CI tool or not, but we use Hudson at Zappos and it works pretty well.
http://hudson-ci.org/
..and there's also CruiseControl: http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net/
If you're not talking about CI, maybe you mean QA testing - in which case you should take a look at something like Selenium (for web apps):
http://seleniumhq.org/
If you're doing GUI testing? I'm not really familiar with that area, but I've heard about WinRunner and Rational:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_WinRunner
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/rational/offerings/quality/
..though neither are really free tools. Something like AutoIT might help you move widgets around, but it lacks the reporting parts:
http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/index.shtml
There could be two answer to you question:
Besides Selenium, though it has ample of advantages, I am reading about another tool which uses same API which Selenium use. The only changes in API I have seen so far is it reduces the complexity of functions thus making it more easier and simpler for user who is learning.
The tool is called 'Helium' and it has 50% (and more) less complex functions and code as Selenium has.
The only problem with this tool is it is paid tool for learning purpose and for implementing not-so-big scale project you can use it. But yeah after some time its gonna cost you.
I have implemented some code on Helium. Please let me know , if you face any issue initially or you are thinking to implement it.
Other being, you can use Selenium Builder(http://khyatisehgal.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/selenium-builder-exporting-and-execution/) which is an advanced form of Selenium IDE. It imports your command in different languages and does work more effectively and efficiently as Selenium IDE does(http://khyatisehgal.wordpress.com/2014/05/25/selenium-builder/) . So you can import scripts in Eclipse IDE and just execute them as is.
Please let me know , if you have any doubt in any of the tool.
95% of my time I program ASP.NET (MVC) web sites.
Should I care about MSBuild?
We use MSBuild with CruiseControl.Net to manage the builds of most of our big ASP.NET projects. For every commit of one member of the team, a build is launched. It helps us detect
quickely incompatibilities before moving a feature to "staging" or "production".
I think it is really usefull when working with a team on the same ASP.NET project or if you are working alone on a big project.
That depends on your development environment.
If you have other folks that do deployment of your systems, and they take care of the build and deployment environment, then MSBuild probably won't be necessary for your work.
On the other hand, if you need to configure the build script to understand special situations that your code comes up with, then you will definitely need to understand MSBuild scripts.
Even for a one-man shop, it's a useful tool to know, especially if you are configuring a continuous integration server like Hudson.
No. Until you have to.
Its not absolutely necessary to know MS Build, but it is useful to know.
It might not be needed for all kind of projects, but it is extremely useful when you are working on a huge code base with automated custom build solution/ nightly build/developer builds so on and so forth.
It's unlikely, unless you choose to use it, or you start to make use of Team Foundation Server's Team Build.
Your development processes need to get to a certain complexity before automated builds really deliver their true value and/or if you find need for automatic deployment (including database changes if applicable).
The coming Visual Studio 2010 is going to make it far easier to use, but for now it retains a fairly steep learning curve which you can avoid by using alternatives, or commercial products (e.g. Visual Build Pro, Final Builder etc).
The nice thing is that it is part of the .Net framework, so it's already available as long as you have the framework installed (which it probably is).
So, in short, not really. It's something very useful and powerful though, setting up deployments using MSBuild can be very, very useful.
What should a developer know about MsBuild?
Every developer should know it exists and it's basic capabilities. If know it exists you won't duplicate its features and will know what it can do for you, when you need it.
Minimum:
As an exercise, build your project through the command line: msbuild myproj.sln
Know the role of continuous integration
A little more than minimum:
Hack your csproj (or vbproj) with a message task, so it outputs something during clean.
All done. When you need to know more, you'll figure it out.
I've been pushing for continuous integration at my company since I joined 5 months ago, but having seen the type of applications we work on I'm starting to think that it might not be worth the effort of setting up each and every project for continuous integration.
If you work in a development department where the average project takes 2-3 weeks and once it's deployed you seldom if ever have to worry about it, is continuous integration worth the hassle of setting it up?
Probably depends on your process. If you have unit tests that cover your code, then continuous integration is worth every bit. I'm assuming that you guys all work on a single module of work as the projects are 2-3 weeks.
I don't think folks will run every test for every one of their commits and continuous integration helps a lot here.
The other reason would be if your project is highly modularized. I've worked in systems where there are lots of modules and a developer wouldn't be functional-testing the entire website before committing. Things might not even compile properly as the other module wouldn't even build because the developer did not checkout the complete code.
I'd recommend continuous integration anyway. With setups like Hudson and Cruisecontrol, it doesn't take a lot of time to set up and pays for itself quickly.
Personally, I think CI and the various processes it encourages are always useful. Getting CI setup is rather trivial once you have the server set up itself. You're basically just copying a configuration file from one project, editing it, and creating a new project. I wouldn't not use CI because of the "effort of setting up each and every project".
Continuous Integration is not only a tool matter, but also a set processes (commit regularly, have a version control system...).
Concerning the I.C software, you can install, configure and start to use Hudson in less than 10 minutes! So why would you go without any IC system?
It really depends on how fast you can set up an automated build and then get that hooked up to a CI server.
.NET
I've seen us go from no automated build to an automated build for a project in a few minutes using UppercuT. We use that and CruiseControl.NET (in the configuration, we add a line per project b/c we take advantage of the preprocessor).
http://code.google.com/p/uppercut/
Some good explanations here: UppercuT
If your many apps share any common components or modules, CI and tests will likely help you notice something breaking. If they are really all little throw away, self contained scripts then you might not need CI, but it's a tough call.
As others have pointed out, once CI is setup then adding a new project is trivial so I'd say go for it. One benefit you're going to see is that if any of your projects do ever change you've already got CI and hopefully your unit tests ready to go so you won't get any nasty surprises!
Continous Integration is not only ensuring stuff works, it also allows you to DOCUMENT and TEST the release process as it would be done by a new developer.
This ensures that the customer gets what has been tested, not what the developer just throws together from his harddisk.
This may be extremely important for maintainance purposes.
My team works on a Medium sized product which takes about 2 hours to build on a single dual-core machine.
As part of an effort to improve productivity I am looking for alternatives to improve our build process.
Currently we build C++ code and .NET code using VS2005 solutions, we also have some legacy code built using makefiles and we pack the products using installshield. We also have unit tests written in UnitTest++, Nunit, CPPUnit and some tests that we wrote ourselves without any testing framework. Everything is coordinated by a set of Perl scripts that we wrote.
I am looking for a product, or a suite of products, or a bunch of non-related products that will allow me to do the following:
Improve building time. I tried Incredibuild for parallelizing the build with some success. I will be happy to find more alternatives (cheaper ones???)
Improve the build process definition. I need something to replace our complicated perl scripts with something that will allow me to define the build process easily.
Improve our ability to discover problems in the build (maybe a web interface for looking at build outputs, highlight compilation errors, gather statistics on build times and build failures etc.
Any other nice features that can help us improve our build management.
Consider NAnt: http://nant.sourceforge.net/, CruiseControl: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CruiseControl, and a faster build system. there are some .NET related links at: http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/dashboard.action
Edit: Gradle is probably the best choice now.
Try FinalBuilder it's very compreshesnsive build managment tool
Sakin,
I think you may be looking for two different tools - although occassionally you will find them packaged together.
One tool would be the build management system that schedules the builds, shows you the outputs, gathers statistics, etc. Tools like FinalBuilder, CruiseControl and AnthillPro play in that space.
The other tool would be the one that tears apart your build into parallelizeable pieces and speeds the build. Incredibuild is pretty good at what they do in that respect and certainly cheaper than some alternatives. There are free options built into some of the open source tools like gmake, but my understanding is that you'd need to do some pretty serious work to get that to work with solution files.
You should be able to mix and match at will. We have customers using Anthill with Incredibuild, gmake, and a number of other build speeding tools.
I used Automated QA's Automated Build Studio a few years ago at a previous job and it was pretty good and fairly cheap. I haven't used it since then, so I'm just recommending you look at it.
If you have an MSDN subscription you should look at TFS. TFS Build is pretty robust and is integrated into Visual Studio and works hand in hand with Team System/TFS Source Control (you didn't say what source control you're using).
We have a process similar to yours, although it's not a VS project. Up until recently we used perl scripts and tinderbox to build and track the status of the builds and unit tests. We've recently made the jump over to Hudson and it seems to work great.
https://hudson.dev.java.net/
Don't be put off by the java label, our projects are c/c++ and they work fine. Hudson can execute shell commands, so we can build our projects (makefiles) and run our unit tests fine. Right now we have it set on a timed build, which when it finishes (if successfully) kicks all our unit tests off in parallel.
It's a great system and worth checking out if it's what you're looking for. It logs console ouput and has tons of great addons (logs and charts warning counts, disk space used size, build on CM change) and a nice web-interface for the team to watch.
Oh yea it's free..
I wouldnt advise HUDSON .. there is unnecessary too much bragging about it ..
hudson is limited tools other than it can do much more and have a better bui8lt core architecture
The suggestion to go with anthillpro and incredibuild is a good one !!
With regard to the "Hudson has extensive plugins .. blah blah blah " its really is a sham ..
What ever hudson CANNOT achieve it is core architecture it does so as a plugin
Surprisingly if i have to mask a passsword or any credential i cannot do it without the "password masking" plugin ..
Ideally if a system is "enterprise scalable" this masking should be built into it core
This just one example .. i have a clear analysis for these tools but cannot upload a document here
Moving to the other side
Hudson "looks and feels" "nice & cute" and is relatively light weight