We are attempting to introduce continuous integration into our MATLAB environment. Now that MATLAB supports testing and TAPPlugin I am hoping to run all of my tests from command line and output to a tap file, but I am a little confused about how to make TFS Build consume the file and fail the check in if the tests did not pass.
Has anyone attempted to integrate TAP output with TFS?
We have decided to investigate TFS extensibility and are working to write our own TAP parser to work with TFS.
Inspiration found here:
Related
I've been using NAnt for sometime and although it works pretty well most of the time, some functionality is so limited you find yourself doing a page worth of work instead of couple of lines.
My biggest problem is returning results from exec task.. you HAVE to output to file then read the file then in my case substring what you read.
Multiply that by 8 different queries and you have lots of unnecessary work.
Anyway I would like to switch MSBuild which has much better support in this case.
But the problem is that I am using CI + Nant to deploy on staging and sometimes production and Nant is just a directory with files that you copy.
But As far as I know MSBuild must be installed and registered.
Is there such a thing as a standalone MSBuild download?
Thanks
I don't have time today to write up a rough history for MSBuild (I already covered ASP.NET on IIS and C# compilers), but I would tell you that MSBuild is not only standalone today, but open source at GitHub,
https://github.com/microsoft/msbuild
You can download the installers from Microsoft Downloads, or you can compile your own.
Reference: Rough History of MSBuild
I'm using Visual Studio Online's build tools to deploy web applications from a single solution. I've occasionally been running into file locking issues.
Error: Web Deploy cannot modify the file 'Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.CSharp.dll' on the destination because it is locked by an external process.
After some Googling, I believe the "fix" is to stop the web applications before deployment on Azure and start it back up after. Sounds legit.
However, there does not seem to be a straight forward way to do this directly on VSO's build definitions. I've created an "Azure Powershell" build task, but it wants a PS1 file from the repository. It doesn't seem to let me just run Azure Powershell commands (e.g. Stop-AzureWebsite) from here. My team has created a work-around where we have a "run.ps1" that just executes the command you pass as a parameter, but none of us are satisfied by that.
What are we missing? There has got to be an easier way to do this without having a PS1 script checked into source control.
I solved this by installing Azure App Services - Start and Stop extension from Visual Studio Marketplace.
When installed, it will allow you to wrap the Deploy Website to Azure task in your Release definition with Azure AppServices Stop and Azure AppServices Start tasks, effectively eliminating the lock issues.
Check if you are using "/" on the "Web Deploy Package" path for folder separators instead of "\".
i.e. change
$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)/My Project/drop/MyFolder/MyFile.zip
for
$(System.DefaultWorkingDirectory)\My Project\drop\MyFolder\MyFile.zip
I noticed that was the only difference between the one I was getting the error and the others (the Restart step I added was not helping). Once I modified the path, I got it working.
Sounds crappy, but fixed my issue.
Did you use the Build Deployment Template that sets the correct msbuild parameters for you for your package? You can see how here. I would create a build using that template and see if you have the same issues. If so ping me on Twitter #DonovanBrown and I will see if I can figure what is going on.
As a rule it is good practice to have any scripts or commands required to deploy your software to be checked into source control as part of your build. They can then be easily run repeatedly with little configuration at the build level. This provides consistency and transparency.
Even better is to have deployment scripts output as part of the build and use a Release Management tool to control the actual deployment.
Regardless having configuration as code is a mantra that all Dev and Ops teams should live by.
I'm building a Visual Studio 2010 solution through Python with a call to subprocess. When called directly from the command line it takes devenv.com ~15 seconds to start. But when called from Python this jumps up to ~1.5 minutes.
Naturally I'm hoping to remove that dead time from our build. So I decided to test out MSBuild.exe (from .NET 4). It looks like MSBuild.exe runs instantly. But... it seems to do a full build every time and not an incremental.
The command I'm using is
"C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\MSBuild.exe" "C:\path\to\my\project.sln" /target:build /maxcpucount:8 /property:Configuration=Release
It seems like this should support an incremental build. But I've seen posts online indicating that msbuild may not be able to support a incremental build like this.
Is this possible? If so what am I doing wrong?
Update:
I've read into this a bit more. Based on
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171483.aspx
and
http://www.digitallycreated.net/Blog/67/incremental-builds-in-msbuild-and-how-to-avoid-breaking-them
It seems like I need the Input and Output properties set in my .vcxproj files. Checking out my files these are indeed missing.
When would they be generated? Most my .vcxproj files were converted over from Visual Studio 2008. But I also generated a new project which is missing the Input and Output properties as well.
Does VS2010 not create projects with these properties?
Update: We've since upgrade to VS 2013. Now msbuild supports incremental builds. Never got to the bottom of the VS 2010 issue.
I think that fact that Incremental builds are not supported is a false Statement from according to official sources,Managed Incremental Build this feature and was included in VS2010 SP1
We first introduced the managed incremental build feature in VS2008.
In VS2010, we were not able to re-implement the managed incremental
build feature with the build system moving to MSBuild. We received
strong customer requests for this feature. As a result, we
re-implemented this feature and it is included in VS2010 SP1.
Other Solutions I found on Web
Projects should build incrementally already (just make sure that you
do Build instead of Rebuild). The best way to check if incremental
building works is to run the build from the command line. The second
time you build it should take almost no time.
If things are still getting rebuilt, then perhaps you've modified
your projects in some way that's messing up with the build order.
Looking at the build logs (via the /v option) can help you poinpoint
what's going on.
Other reason which can cause problems with the incremental build is GenerateResource.TrackFileAccess PropertyThis API supports the .NET Framework infrastructure and is not intended to be used directly from your code.
Gets or sets a switch that specifies whether we should be tracking file access patterns.
I am learning TFS 2010 from scratch and no doubt making every mistake in the book.
I have created a web.testing.config for my build to the test server.
In my build process I click the plus sign for "Items to Build" in "1. Required" and I specify "Any CPU | Testing".
The build clean compiles but ... I still seem to be using the web.config file I use in development rather than the one I want in testing.
The first line in web.testing.config is
This should ensure that any differences in this file are implemented.
So I am not sure I am configuring the build properly, or if the web.testing.config is set properly.
What you are looking for is a feature called web.config transforms, and it works slightly differently.
In Visual Studio right click on web.config and choose option Create Tranforms -- if you have not done this already.
Read samples on using tranform syntax, the link is in the web..config created for you. You will need it.
In TFS team build, create a separate step in your build template to build deployment package. The command is in this thread. This will create a deployment package -- a file with .zip extension.
To deploy the package, use WebDeploy tool. It has both UI and command line if you want to make it completely automated.
I'm trying to integrate Robot Framework (an acceptance testing framework) with TeamCity. In order to do this it needs to send messages to the console output which TeamCity will then read and return realtime test progress/results. I'm doing this by calling the command line to run the tests with a simple exec task. Everything seemed to be working other than I was only getting the results at the end of the run and not on the fly.
After a bit of struggling with NAnt I swapped to using MSBuild and everything worked first time.
I have what I need now, but for completeness I'd like to find out why I couldn't get it working with NAnt. As far as I can tell the issue is that NAnt is prefixing all console output with [exec]. Is it possible to suppress this?
I don't think the console output is configurable.
NAnt is open source: you could fork your own copy and/or submit a feature patch.