Automating With Jenkins

I'm re-configuring our project build to use Jenkins instead of CruiseControl. I'm sure the entire world is bound to find this extremely fascinating, so I am blogging about it. There are a number of little reasons for this, but mostly it's simply because I find CCNet to bed tired and old and Jenkins to ben the new hotness. Actually, I am just up for learning something new, and since we need to create a new build environment anyway, I figured I'd take a shot at using Jenkins.

A bit about the project

It is a .Net project that uses the .Net 4.0 framework with a WPF client that communicates to a WCF Web Service that communicates with a WCF Windows Service. It's not a bad architecture, though probably not the BEST architecture. It is definitely not an architecture that is easily testable. It uses SQL Server 2008 as the data store and our version control is SVN.

Our old build environment, like I said, uses CruiseControl.Net. It was what we were using for previous projects, and was adequate for simply doing our build. Now that we are getting into automating our unit and acceptance tests, however, its age is showing. We are generally building for x64 processors and the build environment is an x86 processor. SQL Server 2005 is installed, but not 2008. The version of NCover and NUnit that are installed are outdated and NUnit 2.4.8 will not handle assemblies written for .Net 4.0.

Onward!

So while our IT department is building me a virtual machine with the build environment that I want, I am going to try to and get an automated build running on my laptop with Jenkins. Wish me luck.