Generic MSBuild Script

Question

I am trying to build a generic MSBuild script that will be called programmatically from ASP.Net page. This script should do the following:

1) Check out the source code (all projects are asp.net projects) from SVN.

2) Build and publish the web project.

3) Run a c# component which will do some manipulation on the published web project ( I can't tell what manipulations. sorry for that)

4) Create a Wix File and generate the MSI.

The input parameters to this script would be the SVN URL, Environment (DEV, UAT etc) and project file to build.

Can someone please guide whats the best way to achieve this? The ASP.Net page should get regular notifications of the each step as it completes.

My Initial thoughts are to implement this as a WCF service hosted as Windows service so that i can run this as a long running process on the build server. Do you all see any major disadvantages of this approach?

Please let me know your comments or suggestion to solve this issue.

Please NOTE that i cannot TFS or any other continous build mechanism.

Answer 1

I don't think it's possible to answer this question. Basically you want to take the entire ALM process including authoring the install and turn it into a push button script that takes a handful of arguments. It's really not that simple and will take weeks of development time to accomplish.

The reality is you need a CI system whether you want to accept it or not.

Answer 2

Can you expand on why you can not use TeamCity but can reimplement it in a (likely inferior) way? (It doesnt use ASP.NET but other than that, it has everything you want - you just have to customise the build script)