TeamCity Blog

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

We are glad to announce the new EAP release of TeamCity 3.0. This release provides a number of useful and long-awaited features.

• Search by the build number. The found builds are displayed in a pop-up window, and you can also view the found builds on a separate page:



• A brand new feature: build tagging. The easy to apply labels help you to better organize the builds history and quickly navigate to the builds marked with the specific label. You can apply multiple tags for a single build, for example, “EAP”, “release”, and others:



• Possibility to take the thread dumps for both Java and .NET build processes. This new feature helps to investigate the problems of the currently running build right from the web UI:



• Numerous statistics-related improvements:
  • Builds range and status filters added
  • Code coverage statistics graph is added with 4 series for class, method, block, and line coverage
  • Build sources checkout time now can be extracted form the full build duration time and is displayed as a separate Clean build duration graph:

  

• Subscription to the finished builds RSS feed of the selected build configuration to help you stay up-to-date with the current projects status. Click the Subscribe link located at the bottom of the build configuration page and configure your feed reader to monitor TeamCity builds RSS.



• Several VCS-related improvements:
  • per-VCS root user names (possibility to set a specific username for each VCS root)
  • VCS trigger quiet period: TeamCity triggers a build only if there are no changes for the specified time in all VCS roots of a build configuration
  • VCS triggering filters by VCS user and VCS root (allows to prevent build triggering after changes submitted by a particular user or changes from a specific VCS root)
• Miscellaneous improvements including ability to view a web diff for personal changes, ability to edit TeamCity server URL through the web UI and VCS roots attaching from the project’s page.

And as usual, the new release includes multiple bugfixes and performance improvements.

View the release notes and download the latest build. We eagerly wait for your feedback at our discussion forum.

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

The most essential steps for the software developers of their daily chores are modifying the code, integrating the changes, and waiting for feedback on changes integration. Depending on the project scale it may take a significant amount time. And if the developer’s changes break the code base, fixing the problem and verifying the changes always takes time. Meanwhile the development process can simply freeze, time is wasted, and deadlines are missed.

We decided to change the situation for the better: compared with the standard scenario - edit the code, commit, and verify the code quality - TeamCity’s pre-tested commit allows you to remotely verify your changes before committing them to the version control system. Thus, the project code base is always clean.

You may have noticed a new page has recently appeared on TeamCity’s web site providing the visual description of pre-tested commit.

In the nearest future we plan to publish a big article with pre-tested commit description: feature history, workflow, peculiarities in different IDE’s, and more.

Good news for the .NET platform developers: in TeamCity 3.0 you can perform pre-tested commit from within Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2. The EAP build is already available for download.

Technorati tags: TeamCity, pre-tested commit JetBrains, IntelliJ IDEA, continuous integration, build management, agile development, MS Visual Studio 2003