As a matter of fact I was playing around with Hudson few days ago, it’s a great CI server – it’s refreshing to see a good and intuitive user interface and that not all things have to be configured manually using XML files like in CruiseControl.NET. And it has some support for .NET development, too (plugins for FxCop, for example). The tools you mention do have certain .NET equivalents, although the .NET world is still way behind Java in those respects (and some .NET tools are not open source). Unfortunately I haven’t yet found a .NET tool that would be as powerful and mature as Maven – there are some attempts (like Byldan, http://www.codeplex.com/byldan) which I will investigate further.

For example, a multi-module project using Maven as the build system can build all of the modules with a simple command: “mvn package”

For a CI server, the big three are Cruise Control, Continuum, and Hudson.

Tools like PMD, FindBugs, Crap4j, and Checkstyle perform static analysis of the code to find potential problems and ensure that the coding style meets the organizational guidelines.

We can generate charts and reports from the results of those and even store the results in a database for trend analysis.

Tools like Emma and Cobertura can generate reports on test coverage.

All of those can be done with a few lines in the build file.

Finally, using a dependency management system like Maven, allows keeping dependent libraries out of version control and can even take care of transitive dependencies.

I’m pretty sure there are .net equivalents for many of those. CI has been going on for a long time in the Java community. Ideally, the .net community can benefit from the trials and mistakes that have already been made on the other side.

Great post

The trouble with RSS feeds is that most people I know don’t even know what a RSS feed is, sadly, let alone use any kind of a feed reader. So I find email to still be the best option for a non-collocated team. The other thing is that by placing the person who broke the build to on the “to:” list and the rest of the team to “cc:”, you usually get builds fixed more quickly… a little psychology can help you

Very sensible advice. I’ve stopped using email for build notification. Once I sent a client a few thousand emails over the weekend. More importantly, RSS feeds or build radiators are more valuable.