Setting up a Continuous Integration System, Part 9: Conclusion

This is the final part in an ongoing series about setting up a continuous integration system. The series includes:

1. Part 1: Introduction
2. Part 2: Project Folders
3. Part 3: CI Workflow
4. Part 4: CI Server Baseline Software
5. Part 5: CruiseControl.NET Custom Plug-in: Update Version
6. Part 6: CruiseControl.NET Custom Plug-in: Source Retrieval
7. Part 7: Installing CruiseControl.NET and Custom Plug-ins
8. Part 8: Configuring CruiseControl.NET
9. Part 9: Conclusion (this post)

Setting up and maintaining—not to mention blogging about—a CI environment is a lot of work. It takes time, persistence, and a bit of dedication. Hopefully this series will give you a head start or at least a place to get more information on setting up a new CI environment or maintaining or even improving an existing one.

So, what's next?

Let's face it: no development project is ever truly done. The same goes for your CI environment. There's always a new process, tool, or procedure to add to make it just a little (or maybe a whole lot) better. I hear a lot of good things about NAnt. It's something I'd like to look into. Ditto for MSBuild scripting, which some people use to perform all of their CI tasks.

On the plug-in front, an immediate improvement to my updver (update version) plug-in would be if the plug-in accepted an array of assembly files to update rather than just the one per task declaration. The end result would be a cleaner and more readable ccnet.config file.

I'm sure there are other things. Perhaps some of them are future blog posts waiting to happen.

That's it… for now

This concludes this series of posts. I'll no doubt continue to edit the series as needed, keeping it updated with new ideas and that sort of thing. One of the charters of this blog is to serve as a documentation base for yours truly, so I know I'll be visiting the posts occasionally for refreshers and just to figure out how or why I did something the way I did it.