TeamCity Blog

After, yes, we admit, a long break we unleash a new EAP build of TeamCity 4.0 which has a great number of new features, plus multiple performance improvements and bugfixes. Among the major ones:

• reordering of NUnit tests
• redesigned plugins packaging
• possibility to redefine certain build parameters on manual build run
• running personal builds on a specific build agent from within IntelliJ IDEA
• configurable charts on Projects page
• support for Diana (IntelliJ IDEA 8 EAP project file format)
• and much more…

Please download this build and familiarize with the release and upgrade notes.

Happy building and wait for your feedback!

Technorati tags: TeamCity, JetBrains, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, EAP, roadmap, continuous integration, build management, database, MySQL, PostgreSQL, oracle, MS SQL 2005, agile development, MS Visual Studio 2005, MS Visual Studio 2008

If you want to investigate the problems of a particular build and find out, for example, the changes which caused the build failure, you can use TeamCity’s Difference Viewer. It allows to review the differences between two versions of a modified file and navigate between these differences.

You can access the Difference Viewer from almost any place in TeamCity’s UI where the changes lists appear, may it be Projects page, Build Configuration Home page, or Build Results > Changes tab and so on. After you click the modified file name, a new window opens:

In the window heading you can see the file modifications summary:

• file name alone with its status,
• changes author,
• comment for the changes list.

To move between changes, use the next and previous change buttons and red and green bars on the versions separator.

If you want to switch to the IDE and digg into the issue deeper, click the Open in the IDE button in the upper-right corner of the window. The file in question opens, and you will navigate to the exact change in your project file. Please note that you need to have a TeamCity IDE plugin installed for this.

Technorati tags: TeamCity, JetBrains, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, difference viewer, continuous integration, build management, agile development, MS Visual Studio 2005, MS Visual Studio 2008

Here, at JetBrains, we use TeamCity to build all our projects - commercial, open-source, and internal solutions. This is why we understand the value and importance of information that will be kept “inside” TeamCity server as well as the burden of setup, adoption, and maintenance of “yet another server” for your company.This is why we support four major industry-wide databases:

• MySQL (5.0.40+)
• PostreSQL (8+)
• Oracle (10+)
• Microsoft SQL 2005

to back end your TeamCity server, so you can reuse your existing IT infrastructure in the most efficient way. 

To ease the evaluation process, TeamCity comes with a built-in pure Java database (HSQLDB) that works out of the box under any environment without any additional configuration. When you evaluate TeamCity to see whether it suits your needs and which benefits it brings, it collects information on the build results and preserves it in this simple built-in database. But because of its simplicity, the database does not scale well and is not targeted on a real production.

Once you decide to handle the software building process to TeamCity and use it for production purposes, you need to switch to one of the supported databases most suitable for your environment and infrastructure. Please note that after initial setup the external database does not require any kind of special maintenance - TeamCity server does everything automatically using the database you have selected, and you control performance, scalability, and safety.

The database switching process is rather simple and straightforward:

1. Stop TeamCity server.
2. Back up the TeamCity data directory.
3. Follow an extensive explanation of this procedure in the Setting up an External Database and Migrating to an External Database sections of our online reference.

We strive to make both adoption and production usage as easy as possible, and if you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line - either here or at teamcity-feedback at jetbrains dot com.

Technorati tags: TeamCity, JetBrains, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, EAP, roadmap, continuous integration, build management, database, MySQL, PostgreSQL, oracle, MS SQL 2005, agile development, MS Visual Studio 2005, MS Visual Studio 2008

After series of long discussions we have finally managed to extract a list of features based on your feedback and votes, and create a TeamCity 4.0 roadmap. Among the feature highlights of the following release:

• composite builds
• builds promotion
• statistics-related improvements
• .NET platform support enhancements
• teamwork facilitation

Let us note that the roadmap is still a subject of change, and we eagerly wait for your suggestions, votes, and feedback at our forum or issue tracker.

The preliminary release date is the fall of this year. Meanwhile, you can keep an eye on the development process and participate in our EAP program where you can always find the most recent builds and learn about changes and progress we have made.

As always we wish you happy building!
The JetBrains TeamCity Team

Technorati tags: TeamCity, JetBrains, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, EAP, roadmap, continuous integration, build management, agile development, MS Visual Studio 2005, MS Visual Studio 2008

In addition to several time-saving features supporting quick testing and getting notifications as soon as the first problems appear, TeamCtiy now enables even faster feedback on tests results resulting in more rapid and efficient development. This new feature can become especially useful if your builds take rather long time (this case is true for our company as well) when the waste of time can become a critical factor of the project success.

When setting up the build runner of your build configuration with Ant and Ipr build runners and JUnit and TestNG frameworks you can now select to run:

• recently failed tests first (tests failed in previous finished or running builds and tests which fail from time to time)
• new and modified tests first (tests which were recently added or edited in your changelists and included in the running build)

Selecting these options you forces your build run these types of tests before any others.

You can select either one or both of these types of tests and use the feature if you run tests using your own custom build runner.

Now just a few words about how tests reordering mechanism works:
TeamCity provides tests that should be run first (test classes), after that when a JUnit task starts, it checks whether it includes these tests. If at least one test is included, TeamCity generates a new fileset containing included tests only and processes it before any other filesets. It also patches other filesets to exclude tests which were added to the automatically generated fileset. After that JUnit task starts and runs as usual.

We hope the feature (available in the latest EAP build) will save much time for you, and you will use it on a daily basis especially when starting personal builds.

Technorati tags: TeamCity, JetBrains, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, continuous integration, build management, agile development, testing, MS Visual Studio 2005, MS Visual Studio 2008

We are always happy to know that people are using TeamCity and love it. Whenever someone shares an experience of successful long-term usage (like Matt Wright and Peter Pascale recently did) or just tells about the first impression of TeamCity (like Ron Gross), it’s a great pleasure for us.

And it brings even more pleasure to know that the features TeamCity is originally based on, such as:

• Pre-tested commit
• Build grid
• Code quality analysis
• Comprehensive statistical reports

find appreciation from almost anyone who tasted them.

Of course, there are many things in TeamCity that deserve to be mentioned — for example, integration with industry-leading IDEs or the possibility of almost throughout customization, and so on, and on, and on… But as wise men say, seeing is believing!
So, don’t miss a chance to check it yourself — download the latest TeamCity version or try the piping hot EAP release, and share your opinion with us at our issue tracker and online forum.

Wish you a happy building,
JetBrains TeamCity team

Technorati tags: TeamCity, JetBrains, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, continuous integration, build management, agile development, testing, MS Visual Studio 2005, MS Visual Studio 2008

In the forthcoming version of TeamCity, which we are working on right now, we want you to gain more control and a useful overview of the specific project. This is going to be a “space” for evaluating its different aspects.

Clicking some project name on the Projects page you now navigate to a page containing a list of all project’s build configurations and their statistics.

The Overview tab displays quite common build configuration-related information (similar to what you see on the Projects page). On the Statistics tab you can view several graphs depending on the build configurations specified for the project; these can, for example, be inspections, duplicates, coverage and number of code lines. You can change the view of the graphs by applying various filters and provide your own metrics soon.

We are polishing the feature right now, and will likely introduce some serious changes in it. We’ll tell about them in the nearest posts but right now we would like to get as many comments and suggestions as possible.

Download the EAP build and share your opinion with us at our tracker or online forum.

Technorati tags: TeamCity, JetBrains, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, continuous integration, build management, agile development, MS Visual Studio 2005, MS Visual Studio 2008

After a short break in developing new features we are glad to launch the Early Access Program for TeamCity version 4.0.
A list of this EAP build features includes the following:

• “Run recently failed tests first” and “Run new and modified tests first” options for Ant and Ipr Build Runners and JUnit and TestNG frameworks
• A separate page for each project with a list of all its build configurations and selected statistical reports of the project
• Various notifications improvements: possibility to customize the order of processing your notification rules; “first failure/success” notifications are also supported for “Builds with my changes” notifications
• Custom statistics now supports multiple series (values) display on a single chart
• Multiple performance improvements
• and more…

View more detailed release notes and download the build. As usual, we remind you to back up your data before upgrade.

Don’t miss your chance to influence the development process and vote for already existing features or submit new ones at our issue tracker and online forum. We greatly appreciate and eagerly wait for your feedback!

Wish you happy building!
The JetBrains TeamCity team

Technorati tags: TeamCity, JetBrains, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, continuous integration, build management, EAP, early access program, agile development, MS Visual Studio 2005, MS Visual Studio 2008

Yes, we admit that every so often TeamCity like any other application can misbehave or slow down for some reason you cannot understand, and traditional “close and open” method (or “shutdown and start” in TeamCity terms) does not always help to get rid of the headache…

Now you don’t need to spend ages when trying to diagnose the problem. We have created a utility for taking the CPU profiling snapshots of the TeamCity server right from the web UI. Download the latest version of this plugin and see the installation instructions for details.
And please note that it is compatible with TeamCity 3.1 and higher.

Have an untroubled building!

Technorati tags: TeamCity, JetBrains, Java, VCS, .NET, IntelliJ IDEA, continuous integration, build management, agile development, best practices, MS Visual Studio 2003, Eclipse, profiling, plugin

This post continues the story of new TeamCity plugins which have just appeared. Today we would like to tell you about two third-party plugins.

The Growl notifier plugin delivers alerts using Growl engine.

Another plugin named Team piazza displays the current state of the build informing the team when the build fails and provides much other useful information on the current build state.

We would like to remind you that anyone can become a member of TeamCity plugin development community and develop plugins for integration with different change management systems, build runners, IDEs, or notification means using TeamCity’s Open API. Get more information in TeamCity online reference.

Thank you very much for your effort!
The JetBrains TeamCity team

Technorati tags: TeamCity, JetBrains, IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, continuous integration, build management, agile development, MS Visual Studio 2005, MS Visual Studio 2008, plugin, Open API, extensibility