CruiseControl.Net 1.3 was released this morning. To me, most important was the new Build Queue functionality, stopping multiple projects from building at the same time. If ProjectB depends on ProjectA, and they both get code changes committed at the same time, they will fail from contention. Either ProjectA will fail because it can’t delete its old assemblies (because ProjectB has a lock on them) or ProjectB will fail because it can’t find the ProjectA assemblies (because ProjectA deleted them in its rebuild).

No more.

I’m so excited that I am already upgrading our servers!

For those that missed the announcement last week (like I did), the latest version of CruiseControl.Net has been released.

I plan on checking it out this week, then possibly upgrading our Build environment on Saturday. There are some modifications that I am really excited about:

• Log4Net is used. (Default: Rolling file appender for logging server output.) If the traditional Log4Net configuration block is included in the application configuration file, I will probably change that to the ADONet appender, instead.
• Users can volunteer to fix a broken build. How sweet is that!?!
• <prebuild /> section allows custom tasks to run prior to the build. This one is a big bonus; previously, if something went wrong with the build, often the external log files (NUnit, FXCop) from the previous build would get included in the current build’s report. Now the prebuild can give them the boot.
• Caching is used on WebDashboard. We have some huge log files and some not-so-powerful build servers. Sometimes it takes the machine a while to process the XSL. I am hoping that caching will help with that.
• WebDashboard can stop and start projects. I am very excited about the ability to pause individual projects without having to modify the setup or stop the entire service.

This seems like a nice package (Release Notes). I am eager to pull it down and give it a go.

One gotcha that everyone should be aware of: Old versions of the dashboard and CCTray are incompatible with the new version of the service, so both will need to be replaced. Give your development team a heads-up, so they know to replace their tray installation as soon as the new server version is installed and online.

CruiseControl .Net 1.0 has been released. download | release notes

This is a must upgrade for anyone running v0.9 or earlier. There are many updates that I am excited about, most notably the overhaul to CCTray (the client-side build monitoring tool that sits in your system tray). Our developers have had to use Firefox’s CC.Net monitor extension to monitor multiple builds, simultaneously. No more.

We will be upgrading within the next week.