Wednesday, March 28, 2007

CruiseControl.NET and Subversion Revision Labeller plug-in

Last year, I finally managed to get into automated builds at work. We write a lot of platform code for the other business units in our organisation, so any bugs/defects have quite a high visibility; what could be a better way of improving the transparency of our processes than having an easily accessible automated build system, which would not only compile and test our code, but create release/deployment packages, all before we had even arrived at the office? It didn't take too long to get CruiseControl.NET up and running, using a fairly typical open-source blend of Subversion, NAnt, NAntContrib, NUnit etc etc, whicb should all be familiar to anyone who has read Open Source .NET Development, which should really be required reading for all .NET programmers. Using NAntContrib's <version> task, it's easy enough to automatically set the version number in an assembly. What it didn't allow us to do was pass that information back up to CruiseControl for display in the web dashboard or the system tray application for more immediate feedback. So I decided to knock up a plug-in to do just that. I'd already played about with plug-ins for open-source applications, so it wasn't quite so much of a big step. So in October 2006, I posted to the ccnet-user group, announcing the creation of the plug-in, inspired by a blog entry by Jonathan Malek. I got a response from Richard Hensley, who was putting together a library of plug-ins, suggesting I might want to add my code to his library, but unfortunately I haven't had any response to my emails. So I thought I'd take matters into my own hands, and post directly to the CC.NET community site; you can imagine my surprise when I saw that someone else has, fairly recently, also uploaded a Subversion revision labeller! Fortunately, there are enough differences between the two to make it worth uploading; so I now have two contributions to the open-source community, both small and specific to my job, but hopefully useful enough for others to use. Now I just have to get the NAntContrib guys to actually include mine in the builds...

2 comments:

Daniel Skiles said...

This plugin looks quite interesting. Would you be able to post documentation for it at some point?

Unknown said...

Hello David,

I sent you an email because I modified your plugin and i would like to talk with you about it.
Could you please answer this comment to let me know if you didn't receive my email?

Matteo