DevBlog

The Agile movement has changed the way we develop software, even if you are solidly in the Waterfall methodology camp. Increased emphasis on customer involvement, working software, and more involved team work are great benefits to any development process. One addition that you can and should adopt in any size team is Continuous Integration, commonly called CI. With CI builds and unit tests are handled automatically when you check in code. This helps you create better quality software in less time.

For the past few months I?ve been hard at work co-authoring a new book, "Continuous Integration in .NET". There are many tools available to do this. The best know is probably Microsoft?s Visual Studio Team Suite with Team Foundation Server. It has lots of bells and whistles and is pretty easy to setup, but it?s also expensive.

My co-author, Marcin Kawalerowicz, and I are taking a different route. We?ll show you how to use free or low cost tools to get CI working in your environment. We?re focusing on two of the better known solutions, Cruise Control .NET and TeamCity. We walk you through the entire process, beginning to end and include areas that most teams don?t get into such at tessting with FitNesse, documenting with SandCastle, running code analysis, and many other things.

We?re a long way from seeing the book in print. We?re currently targeting July, 2010. But you can get started with the book now. Our publisher, Manning, has a great way to see the book progress and provide input to shape the book and make it a tremendous resource. It?s calling the Manning Early Access Program, or MEAP.

With MEAP, you get to read Chapter 1 for free. You can then purchase either the ebook or both the ebook and the printed book. Either way, you get access to every chapter as it?s available. Currently the first two chapters are online. None of the chapters we?ve written have been polished. Copy editing doesn?t happen until we?re done writing every chapter. Go here to get your MEAP.

By giving you early access to the book, you get access to the Author Forum. It?s on this forum that you can post comments, good and bad, about the book and make suggestions on additional content. You can access the forum here.

I hope you will check out our book and library. We?re working hard to make it a great resource for your library.

// posted by Craig Berntson @ 8:08:00 AM