I was pleased to notice that so many had not had the opportunity to get up to speed on continuous integration before our talk yesterday. Of all the people in the auditorium only 2-3 felt they knew what all the "hoopla" is about.

Even though we could have used the full fifty minute slot, I think that we managed to cover the essence - although there is so much more there in the form of experiences and perspectives to talk about.

As promised here is the presentation slidedeck. Since it was so heavy on images I have made them smaller, although this download is still large (6mb).

Links to good articles - the web is naturally full of both good and bad, but don't miss these:

• "Continuous integration", good article by Martin Fowler.
  There is actually a new and an old version.
  
• "The agile difference for SCM" Very nice agile overview with SCM focus by Appleton et al.
  
• From some XP summaries by Don Wells (this one has some links to interesting discussions on c2 wiki) and Ron Jeffries
• "Continuous Integration – just another buzzword?", nice overview by Appleton et al
• "Codeline Merging and Locking: Continuous Updates and Two-Phased Commits" , good info on 2-p commit pattern (Brad Appleton, Steve Konieczka, Steve Berczuk, same gang as above)
• "Agile SCM - Build Management for an agile team"

On the conference:
We had a great time at Developer Summit 2006 in Kista, Stockholm. I applaud all the great guys and gals at Cornerstone for managing to create such a cozy gathering!

The first day started out with an interesting overview of mashups and the semantic web. Erik did a great top 10 developer donts kind of thing that I enjoyed very much - highlighting best practices, many of which are reexposed in agile. After lunch, Jimmy did TDD and we got a nice agile progression going upto my CI talk. The second day highlights for me was probably Manges entertaining causerie on Web 2.0 and an entertaining overview of open source development in .NET by Mats Helander. Patrik did WF and Johan a potpourri of coming VS.NET stuff.


Lets hope we get the same kind of event next year. For more conference and development fun this year, keep your eye on Öredev scheduled for November.

If you are migrating to VS.NET 2005 and converting projects, the VS.NET conversion wizard will do that for you. Then you can use MSBee to compile into both 1.1 and 2.0 assemblies.

 

However, if you are migrating the build process perhaps before all projects in your organization have migrated, people will still be developing in VS.NET 2003 for some time, yet you want to have a standardized build process, around MSBuild.

 

This little MSBuild task will convert a VS.NET 2003 project on the fly so that you can use MSBuild to compile it.

 

Pretty niche scenario, yet since I found myself there, others probably will too.

 

It is easy to use, you just slap a Using element and then use the task, giving it the projects name. Thats it. Installation is xcopy. The readme gives step-by-step instructions. Happy building!

ConvertTo2005.zip (10.87 KB)

Agile methods focus on the people issues in developing software; the people perspective of the open source movement - ie the community - is often the perspective that is most emphasized and cherised, for good reason. People are always the focus, technology is secondary.

Rob Mensching at microsoft (who is behind MS open source - CPL - licensed WIX installer toolkit) has a very nice post about the people part of OSS.

Are all of the agile practices so new?

My presentation last week on effective development of existing code in .NET using testsupport seemed to have been very appreciated.  The materials can be downloaded from the dotway site, the directlink is this.

I had atleast double the amount of material prepared, but we needed to focus on some basics as well which made the available time less. The download includes the presented material only, in order to not confuse too much. (Dotway plug: If you are interested in more testsupport techniques such as TDD and what I talked about this time, we do offer a 2 day introductory course announced here).

This week I get some vacation in the alps.