TeamCity Blog

Hooray!

This year TeamCity has again received a Jolt productivity award in the Collaboration Tools category, and it is the first time we are recognized in Project Management Tools category!

IntelliJ IDEA - our flagship product - received an award for being a productive Development Environment.

We are very happy and proud that all our effort and work was not in vain and glad to see our tools get wider acceptance in IT world.

We would also like to congratulate and wish all the best to the other Jolt winners and Jolt judges and promise to keep on the good work

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

Even though TeamCity 3.0 brought a great deal of new features, it was long long ago - to be more precise - last year… Since then we got so much feedback and feature requests which we greatly appreciate and understood that we had to work harder A result is TeamCity 3.1 which is mostly a maintenance release but also brings a number of tasty features:

• Visualization of Build Agents’ workload
• “Time to fix tests” statistics report for monitoring the project health
• Improvements in 3rd party .NET tools integration
• More types of notification options
• Improved external database support (Oracle)
• Scope filter for Code Duplicates and Inspections browsers
• New options for builds triggering

Plus multiple user interface enhancements, performance improvements, and bugfixes.

Read the detailed What’s New page at the official website.

Download TeamCity 3.1 and let us know what you think at our forum.

As usual we have updated our public demo server, and you can try the new features of this release without any installation and configuration.

Good luck with your builds!

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

TeamCity 3.1 release is coming. And as we already stated, the release is targeted on the current features maintenance and critical bugfixes but we have also implemented some new features helping you to be more productive with your continuous integration process. Among the feature highlights we would like to name the following:

• New visual metrics for estimating the Build Agents workload and showing the time to fix the failed build tests
• Support for NAnt 0.86 Beta 1 testing framework
• NUnit 2.4 support
• Possibility to specify the mode (x86 or x64) to run the NUnit tests
• NUnit tests categories support for NAnt, MSBuild, and NUnit Launcher
• Reporting tests via standard output enabling smooth integration with unit tests
• Publishing build artifacts while the build is still running. As soon as the build produces a new artifact, it becomes visible and available for download and use in multiple places of TeamCity user interface
• Smarter notifications allowing to be aware on the first failed build after successful
  on the first successful build after failed and all company’s projects status
• Build Queue reordering is now available right on the Projects page
• Find the builds created on particular Build Agents and filter the builds history builds of particular build configuration typing a part of the agent name
• Filtering the code duplicates and inspections results by directories for better navigation in discovered issues
• Code duplicates are not dull looking any more as the syntax is now highlighted
• Improved cleanup options for saving the server disk space
• and many other fixes, polished user interface and improved performance

Download TeamCity 3.1 Release Candidate.

More technical details on this release improvements are available in TeamCity Reference. And as usual we want to ask you to backup your data before upgrading to a new version.

Wish you happy building!
The JetBrains TeamCity team

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

TeamCity and IntelliJ IDEA have been announced the finalists for this year’s Jolt Product Excellence Awards - an annual showcase of products that have the biggest impact on the software industry allowing to create software faster, easier, and more efficient.

TeamCity is nominated in 2 categories, namely, “Collaboration tools” (we were the winners in this category last year!) and “Project Management” tools.

The awards ceremony will take place on March 5, 2008 at the 21st annual Software Development Conference & Expo West at the Santa Clara Convention Center. We believe we have very good chances to win with our innovative approaches and rich functionality.

Keep your fingers crossed while the judges will take an in-depth look at us in the next round of the process!

Technorati tags: TeamCity, teamware, new version, JOLT, StarTeam, Subversion, Perforce, CVS, Clear Case, labeling, Java, .NET, continuous integration, agile

Alex Handy at SD Times, the industry newspaper for software development managers, in the article JetBrains TeamCity 3.0 Provides Visual Build Metrics, pays special attention to the statistic charts that help you evaluate build metrics at a glance. He also appreciates the two editions of TeamCity (free professional and commercial enterprise), and the new possibilities now available for the .NET users: search for duplicates and pretested commit.
Thanks to Alex for the positive feedback
Refer to the online documentation for details about statistic charts, editions and .NET support.

Technorati tags:
TeamCity, teamware,Java, .NET, continuous integration, agile

Since TeamCity 3.0 release we got so much feedback from you that it almost made us drown but we really appreciate you could find time to share your opinion and send those bug reports that helped us to stay in form and make the release of TeamCity 3.0.1 – our final one for this year. View the complete list of issues which we resolved and download this latest version at http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/download/index.html.

We would also like to wish you all the best for 2008 and want to say once again that we’re always ready and open for discussion, and we will try to do our best to incorporate your feature requests and suggestions into our new releases.

Happy holidays and see you in the New Year!

JetBrains TeamCity team

Technorati tags: TeamCity,JetBrains, teamware, new version,Java, .NET, continuous integration, agile

Although the largest part of our blog readers belong to the English-speaking world, we still track the reviews made in other languages and would like to give you an essence of a blog post by Albert Weinert which appeared recently, and you can share with your friends and colleagues.

In the post the author highlights major TeamCity’s 3.0 features he finds most attractive, in particular:

• personal builds from within MS Visual Studio
• Subversion and Team Foundation Server integration
• possibility to build NAnt and MSBuild Scripts and MS Visual Studio solutions

We want to thank the author for his in-depth review.

The reviews like this help us keep in touch with our users and bring new ideas to life balancing many feature requests.

Technorati tags: TeamCity,JetBrains, teamware, new version,Java, .NET, continuous integration, agile

In TeamCity 3.0 we implemented one small but useful feature assisting you with builds’ state troubleshooting: discovering builds which are probably “hanging” at the moment and displaying this information on the Projects and Build Configuration’s homepage:

Of course you don’t always watch and have to watch the project’s health at the projects’ dashboard or the build configuration’ homepage and prefer to stay tuned to your workflow but be informed of hanging builds so your precious time is not wasted and the feedback loop stays reasonable. Nothing more simpler, just customize the notification rule:

1. Navigate to My Settings and Tools | Watched builds and Notifications area.
2. Click the Edit button near the desired notification means (e-mail, Windows Tray Notifier, e-mail, Jabber or IDE notifier).
3. If you already have some notification rules, click the edit link and select The build is probably hanging option. Otherwise create a new notification rule and enable this option.



4. Click Save.
   

Now you can stay tuned to the development or builds management process but you won’t miss the hanging builds situation which may be even dangerous if the changes need to be incorporated quickly and build must be delivered within a very tough timeframe.

Technorati tags: TeamCity, teamware,hanging build, New version, StarTeam, Subversion, search, tag, thread dump, Java, .NET, continuous integration, agile

In this EAP build we make the introduction to the role-based access to TeamCity features and also provide a number of improvements in other areas.

• The server administrators can now assign roles to users (available in Administration | User Accounts, particular user account page, Roles and Permissions tab):
  
  The already existing TeamCity users get the role of developers for all existing projects. You can find more detailed roles description in the release notes.
  In the nearest EAP releases we will improve the UI to allow assignment of roles to multiple users.
• The long-awaited VCS labeling of sources used in the builds is available for CVS and Perforce:



• Duplicates and Inspections runners now can accept Maven2 projects
• Pre-tested commit is supported for IntelliJ IDEA with StarTeam, ClearCase, and Visual SourceSafe version controls
• Duration charts can now be viewed for each unit test across multiple builds
• Search feature improvements: search by build tags and project/build configuration name is now available
• RSS feeds can now include only only the failed/successful builds or builds with changes of a particular user. The feature is accessible from the My Settings and Tools page:
  
• Possibility to set the frequency of querying the VCS for changes (configurable on the server-wide or a single VCS root basis)
• Ability to request immediate changes checking
• A new area on Administration page: a list of all VCS roots configured in TeamCity
• Support for different URLs for accessing the same SVN server from the TeamCity server and IDEs (no extra configuration is required)

View the more detailed release notes and download the latest build.

Technorati tags: TeamCity, JetBrains, Java, .NET, IntelliJ IDEA, continuous integration, build management, agile development, MS Visual Studio 2003, Maven2, Duplicates, Inspections, RSS

In fact, this feature existed since TeamCity 1.0, though it isn’t much publicized.

Yes, we admit that we are lazy developers, and we don’t like to restart the programs after editing their configuration files. That’s why IntelliJ IDEA monitors the changes on the disk and reloads files automatically after an external change takes place. And the same is true about TeamCity: it monitors the state of the configuration files and picks up the changes if the files were modified.

FYI: TeamCity server uses XML-based configuration files to store information about system-wide settings, such as authentication scheme, version control roots, third-party reports configuration, etc. The information about configured projects and various build settings is also stored in XML files.

To be more specific:

• After any changes in TeamCity server configuration files, such as main-config.xml, project-config.xml or any *-config.xml, TeamCity reloads the server configuration (it monitors file modification timestamp). The important consequence - when you save these files, they should be in the valid and parseable state. If you are brave enough to manually edit these files, be careful not to break them.
• If you modify the build agent’s buildAgent.properties file, there is no need to restart the build agent. The build agent will wait until currently running build finishes and will restart and reload its configuration automatically.

This is not a killer feature, of course, but it is interesting enough to deserve a separate blog post.

Happy building,

KIR

Technorati tags: TeamCity, JetBrains, Java, .NET, IntelliJ IDEA, continuous integration, build management, agile development