I'm new to Continuous Integration. I want an advice with what tool should I start deal with. I see that this is the biggest tools right now: CruiseControl.NET, TeamCity and Visual Studio Team System.
I'm using this tools: Visual Studio 2010, Mercurial, NAnt, NUnit.
Both TeamCity and CruiseControl.NET will work fine for this set of tools. Also you can consider alternatives :
The difference is :
1) Pricing. CruiseControl.NET and Hudson are free and open source, while Visual Studio Team System and TeamCity cost money (However Professional Edition of TeamCity is also free).
2) Set up process. All systems have pretty simple UI to get up continuous integration processes except Cruise Control .NET - it uses XML-based configuration files instead (Example)
Essentially all you need from integration system is just to run nant script on commit event and show report. Every continuous integration system can do this. I would recommend Hudson because it is:
I would recommend TeamCity - free for up to three agents, 20 projects and 20 users, runs a variety of builders (NAnt included) and can parse NUnit results (Hudson can do all this too I believe, however I have no used it, so I can't speak from experience).
Having worked with TFS, TeamCity, Bamboo and CC.NET, I can say that TC was the easiest to get up and running, the simplest to deploy multiple remote agents, get insight into builds, and integrated seamlessly with jabber, email, visual studio, windows task tray etc. Just felt good.
Also check out Pulse http://zutubi.com/. Seems to be a bit pricey though. We use TeamCity and I really like it, my only complaint or observation is that it was built first and foremost for Java code builds. They have over time made it more generic, but a company that creates Java tools tends to lean one way and you get that kind of feeling with TeamCity to some extent, although like I said nowadays it's not so much true as a few years back. We use it from Java builds to SQL Server database builds and it works really nice.
If you're laze, you could always use easyCIS. It's cheap, easy to configure and you never have to learn what those build scripts are about. VS2010 is a planned feature though until it goes RTM.