TeamCity Multi-Part Build - How to checkout the code just once

Question

I am trying to create 1 package with multiple build configurations. The first will checkout the code, build it (Solution File configuration), and run nunit tests. If that succeeds, another will then build in release mode. If that succeeds, a final script witll package up the output, and mark it as an artifact.

The problem I'm having is that I don't know how to tell TeamCity not to create new directories for each step, and as a result, the steps are failing. Is there a setting for this? It seems like the dependencies tab would be an appropriate place to look, but I don't seem to understand the instructions, and my tinkering so far has been fruitless.

Answer 1

I basically skipped most of the TeamCity workflow, and instead used a scripting language to handle all of this. (I used Rake and Albacore, which I highly recommend for .net projects)

I'd caution you not to use powershell w/ TeamCity. You have to wrap everything in .bat file, which is fairly excruciating.

So the result, is that I have 1 checkout, and everything builds from this point. It's drastically cut down the amount of time required for the builds, though perhaps that wouldn't be the case if I had a lot of agents available.