Kasi Prasad

Without a strong continuous integration process, a well organized Agile/Scrum project can quickly turn to chaos. Agile is most commonly associated with iterative development, which in turn, implies continuous visibility of a project (Scrum Masters, Product Owners and Stakeholders are always interested in the state of a project) and continuous integration via build automation supply the the foundation for supporting the demanding pace of an Agile/Scrum project.

When I’m developing code on a team, its nice to know that at the very least, the code compiles, unit tests/specifications are passing, the code is well covered and that when I check it in, everyone in the organization who is interested in the state of a project can easily get access to it.

Currently, I am using a set of crafty NAnt scripts along with Team City to ensure the visibility of our project and its associated artifacts.

The NAnt build scripts include features which can compile, execute automated tests/specifications and generate reports, generate code coverage reports, generate code analysis reports, version, create environment specific versions (DEV, QA, PROD, etc), zip the output and back it up to network drive, deploy the the target applications (in my case, web applications) to an integration server for immediate availability as well as an assortment of other things.

Team City listens for check-ins to occur on my source control repository and when it detects one, it grabs the latest version of code and executes the associated NAnt build script. All of the reports generated by the build are visible through the Team City web site interface as well as access to the final build output along with some custom reports that I generate to make it easy to track all of the applications which were affected during the build (paths to generated output, version numbers which were deployed to integration server, etc).

All in all, the combination of a Source Control Repository, NAnt and Team City provide a simple continuous integration solution with valuable information about the latest version of an emerging project.

Did I mention that Team City Professional is FREE for up to 20 Build Configurations and 20 Users! NAnt is an open source .NET port of the popular Ant tool from the Java world and while I know that there are some more modern (non XML) alternatives (Albacore, psake) I decided to stick something I knew for the current project, however in my free time, I’ve been looking at UppercuT, Powershell and Ruby as a .NET build tool.

Since this is my first blog entry I’d like to start by thanking everyone that has inspired and motivated me, not only in my development career but all throughout the way. I couldn’t have made it without you…

Starting on January 28^th, I’ll be delivering a 12 day, boot camp style (10 hour day) course in which we’ll cover the .NET Framework 2.0 BCL (Base Class Library), Web Application Development using ASP.NET and Windows Application Development. This boot camp is geared toward preparing students for Microsoft Certification as Technology Specialist’s (70-536, 70-526, 70-528) on both the Web and Windows platforms. The content is presented at a high pace so it’s expected that attendees have at least one year of hands on .NET (1.0, 1.1, 2.0) in either C# or VB.NET. The course outline can be found here. It’s going to be held at the NetCom Information Technology training center (Empire State Building)

To give a quick rundown of what to expect (note: this is based on Microsoft Official Curriculum, so as much as I’d like to break out some Design Patterns, TDD and an ALT.NET mindset, I’ve got a schedule to keep and a strict set of curriculum, so it won’t be happening):

• Basics of the Base Class Library (lots to cover, system types, system interfaces, etc)
  • Reference Types / Value Types
  • Boxing / Unboxing
  • Exception Handling
  • Generic’s (with an emphasis on generic classes rather than collections)
  • Inheritance and Polymorphism (due to time constraints this is mainly a syntactic discussion)
  • Object Lifecycle (Instantiation, Disposal, Garbage Collection)
• Advanced aspects of the Base Class Library
  • Globalization
  • Code Access Security
  • Cryptography
  • COM+ Interop
  • Creating Windows Services
  • Reflection
  • Multithreading
• Data Access using ADO.NET
• Web Application Development using ASP.NET
  • Web Forms
  • Master Pages
  • Themes
  • Web Parts
  • Membership / Authentication / Authorization
  • Globalization
  • Creating custom controls
• Windows Forms Applications
  • Menus
  • DataBound Controls
  • Performing Asynchronous Tasks
  • ClickOnce
  • MDI Applications
  • Customized Printing
  • GDI+

As always, I will be doing a lot of code examples on the fly and I will post them all here once the course has completed so stay tuned for that. If you’d like any information about this course or would like to attend feel free to drop me an e-mail. Thanks.