وبلاگ افشار محبی

It’s a few months that I am dealing with continuous integration, automatic builds, TFS and Team Foundation Build deeply. Experiences during this period learned me some points that I’m glad to share with all:

1. Don’t assume anything about build agent. Specifically don’t assume any library is installed on the agent, any assembly registered in build agent’s GAC, any specific file/folder structure exists in build agent, etc. Otherwise you may encounter build breaks in other agents or at another time. Best practices here is to assume that build agent has just .Net framework installed on it and nothing more.

2. Always add assembly references from source control maintained dlls in same project and just as relative path not as absolute path. Otherwise you may encounter build breaks.

3. Never ever let anyone direct access to live machine that is dedicated to install continuous integration results instantly, specifically for web application projects. Because someone may manually add/modify a file/folder in the web application path. So you may end with a software that needs manual modifications that are never documented nor automated.

4. Automate database creation. Either via maintaining database creation scripts in source control or with help of ORM’s database auto generating feature.