Continuous integration on the rise in .NET

in: theserverside.net

With the upcoming Visual Studio Team System 2008, the practice of continuous integration (CI) will be a “first class experience,” according to Microsoft. Although CI could be configured in Team Foundation Server 2005, it is now supported right ‘out of the box’ - from within the product.

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According to Microsoft, new CI features in Visual Studio 2008:
• Make it easier to define very specific mappings of what files to include in a particular build definition, where they come from, and where the build products go
• Allow you to define the triggers for when a build starts; continuously on every checkin, or sequentially, queuing checkins until the current build finishes
• Define a fine-grained retention policy for the build products. You can create rules to delete failed builds, but keep partially successful builds, and
• Modify the build definition on the fly, enabling a debug flag for the next build for example.
• Target build agents (machines) to use for the actual build
• Show you more informative and manageable build queues