Best Continuous Integration Setup for a solo developer (.NET)

Question

I'm looking for a lightweight, easy to setup CI server that I can run on my laptop along with Visual Studio & Resharper. I'm obviously looking at all the big names like CruiseControl, TeamCity etc etc but the biggest consideration to me is ease of setup and to a lesser extent memory footprint.

Edit: I'd also like some suggestions for other solutions outside the big 2/3...

Edit: I'm about to accept an answer if no one else has anything to add?

Answer 1

I use TeamCity, and is really, really easy to setup and get it running.

Check the Demos and Documentation. You will have it up and running in less than one hour!

Answer 2

For ease of use, I have found CruiseControl.Net to be very easy. Now when it comes to memory footprint, I'd have to say it does chew up my system. That is that a development box that also hosts CruiseControl.Net is not a good way to go. Unfortunately that is all I had access to when I used it in the past.

I can't speak to the other tools.

Answer 3

I have just started to use CruiseControl.NET.

With no prior knowlege I was able to get it up and running with a single test project using MSBuild, MSTest and Team Foundation Server (i.e. CodePlex) in a couple of hours. I posted a bunch of links to useful resources here Devsta 2008 Day 0: Source Control and CI

I can't help on memory footprint as my project was pretty small. I can tell you that while it's not doing anything (i.e. most of the time) it is using ~5MB on my system. In fact the Tray Icon notifier that comes with it takes up more memory than the service at about 6MB. That goes up when it does stuff of course.

Answer 4

Out of curosity, what benefits do you see from using CI as a solo dev?

We use CI at work to integrate between MANY dev's, but nobody has any trouble running builds on their own box :)

Answer 5

I use CI as a Solo Developer.

When I merge my dev branch into my test branch, CI grabs the code, compiles it, modifies the connection string, changes a couple of app settings, and copies it up via Beyond Compare to my test site for people testers to have a look at.

Answer 6

Hudson is extremely easy to set up, and managing jobs (projects) in it is certainly a breeze compared to e.g. CruiseControl. I'm pretty sure it works great for a solo developer too.

For more, see this answer about using Hudson specifically in a .NET environment.