Is there a pre-made Continuous Integration solution for .NET applications?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

Have a look at Hudson

Answer 3

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.