Monday, February 20, 2012

Jetbrains TeamCity vs. Cruise Control.Net

There are numerous Continuous Integration Build Engines for .NET applications, including Microsoft's own Team Foundation Server Build Engine, but outside of TFS, two of the more common CI Build Engines are Jetbrains TeamCity and Cruise Control.Net.

Below are a list of some of the advantages and disadvantages of Jetbrains TeamCity over Cruise Control.Net (when running on the Microsoft Windows platform):

Advantages:

  1. Configuration is completely done through the Web User Interface.  No need to mess with XML configuration files such as ccnet.config.
  2. Very easy to create template build configurations by which other build configurations can be easily copied/cloned.
  3. Is maintained regularly and receives frequent updates (approximately every month or so)
  4. Great community forums and feedback mechanism to get new features incorporated into each release.
  5. Provides an easy way to configure "Build Steps" that function similar to a workflow in TFS Build.
  6. Provides the ability to perform Buddy Builds/Private Builds.
  7. Provides functionality similar to "Gated Check-In Builds" in TFS.
  8. Well documented
  9. Good support and maintenance of plug-ins
  10. Includes built-in tools such as dotCover for Code Analysis
  11. Can store build configuration information in a database such as SQL Server
  12. Exposes a Web Services API
  13. Provides an easy way to "Tail" the build logs as they are being generated
  14. Allows downloading the entire build log as a single .zip file
  15. Provides a Visual Studio plug-in for build integration with TeamCity
Disadvantages:
  1. Runs on an instance of Apache Tomcat rather than natively in IIS
  2. Built on Java, thereby, requiring Java development knowledge for plug-in development (rather than .NET)
  3. Free edition is limited to 20 build configurations
Based on the list above, you can probably guess that I highly prefer Jetbrains TeamCity over Cruise Control.Net.

What do you think?  Is TeamCity a better overall product than Cruise Control.Net?

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