JetBrains TeamCity Blog

Have you ever asked yourself why TeamCity is so cool? We found the answer a long time ago. TeamCity is great because of you, our users. You constantly suggest improvements, report bugs and discuss new functionality. Every time your energy and involvement motivate us to do our job better than we did before.

Documentation is an essential part of any product and TeamCity is not an exception. We constantly improve the documentation and make it more valuable to you. On the other hand, we know there’s a wide field for improvements and some important topics are missed.

Help us to become better and… happy building!

The recording of our February 12th webinar, Deployment Automation with Octopus Deploy and TeamCity, is now available on JetBrains.tv and YouTube. We would like to thank Paul Stovell for the great session and Paul Stack for helping moderate and answer the large volume of questions. To all of the attendees of the webinar, your attention and participation was simply wonderful. Thank you too.

About This Webinar:

You’re probably familiar with building and testing code in TeamCity, but how do you deploy the built artifacts? How do you promote your deployments between development, test, staging and production environments, while keeping the process reliable, automated and secure? Octopus Deploy can help to solve this problem, by integrating with TeamCity to push your changes out into production.

In this session, Paul Stovell walks through the process of building, testing, packaging and deploying an ASP.NET web applications and Windows Services into different environments using Octopus Deploy and TeamCity.

Additional Resources:

• Webinar Q&A - http://goo.gl/eBifS
• Octopus Deploy – http://www.octopusdeploy.com
• NuGet – http://nuget.org
• Octopus TeamCity add-in – https://github.com/OctopusDeploy/Octopus-TeamCity
• TeamCity sample application – https://github.com/PaulStovell/SilverSardine

You’re probably familiar with building and testing code in TeamCity, but how do you deploy the built artifacts? How do you promote your deployments between development, test, staging and production environments, while keeping the process reliable, automated and secure? Octopus Deploy can help to solve this problem, by integrating with TeamCity to push your changes out into production.

In this session, Paul will walk through the process of building, testing, packaging and deploying an ASP.NET web applications and Windows Services into different environments using Octopus Deploy and TeamCity. This free webinar will take place Tuesday, February 12th from 15:00 – 16:00 CET (Central European Time). Space is limited; please register now.

About Paul Stovell
Paul is a .NET developer and founder of Octopus Deploy, an automated release management solution for developers on the .NET stack. Paul built the product in 2011 with a goal of making repeatable, automated deployments easy. Prior to working full time on Octopus, Paul spent years as a developer, consultant and trainer focussed on WPF, ASP.NET MVC and application architecture, working in industries ranging from investment banking to health care to mining. He is a Microsoft MVP for WPF, and has spoken at many user groups, code camps and Microsoft conferences around Australia. Paul recently returned to Australia after a year of working in London.

This free webinar will take place on August 20th at 4 pm CET (Central European Time). Click here to register. Seats are limited so don’t delay!

Paul Stack is a London based developer working on the .net technology stack. He has spoken all over the UK about his passion for continuous integration and continuous delivery and why they should be part of what developers do on a day to day basis. He believes that reliably delivering software is just as important as its development.

You can follow him on twitter @stack72 or read more about him on his blog.

We’re happy to tell you that TeamCity 7.1 is officially released! If you were following the early access program, you may have noticed that in this release we were mostly focusing on enhancing support for distributed version control systems, such as Git and Mercurial, making the daily work with branches smooth, clear and easy. So give a warm welcome to Feature Branches in TeamCity and check them out!

As you know, Feature Branches in DVCSs like Git and Mercurial allow you to work on a feature independently from the repository and commit all the changes for the feature onto the branch, merging the changes back when your feature is complete. This approach brings a number of advantages to software development teams, however in continuous integration servers that do not have dedicated support for it, it also causes a number of problems, like constant build configurations duplication, poor visibility and in the end loss of control of the process.
Our main idea was to make development and building in branches as simple as possible. Ideally, all you would have to do is to push your branch to a Git or Mercurial repository and TeamCity would detect it and start a build on your changes. And this is how it actually works in TeamCity 7.1! You need to make only one tiny change in your build configuration – let TeamCity know which branches you want it to monitor.
So, here are some highlights:

• Once a change is detected in a branch, TeamCity will start a build in this branch.
• All the builds from branches are marked with branch labels to distinguish them from one another.
  
• In various places in TeamCity UI you can filter builds by branch label: filter all build configurations of a single project, or history, change log, issue log and pending changes for a specific build configuration.
  
• Get a bird’s-eye view on the status of active branches in a build configuration on the dedicated page.
• Run custom builds for specific branches.
• Use all regular TeamCity smart features such as quiet period, per-checkin triggering, dependencies, notifications, new failing tests detection, and so on with DVCS branches!

There’s a lot more to this huge feature, because it relates to many aspects of continuous integration experience, so please make sure to read the release notes to get the full taste of all the goodies we brought to you in this build.

In addition to all that we have also made a number of improvements in different areas:

• Current problems are now shown for collapsed configurations.
• Sticky investigation: the right way to investigate flickering tests.
• Version Control Repository browser: use a tree view to choose a file in the repository instead of typing or pasting the path.
• NTLM HTTP authentication is supported.
• Manually mark build as successful or failed.
• More options to control build steps execution.
• Checkout on label in Perforce integration.
• Bundled Xcode runner.
• Amazon EC2 EBS-based instances support.
• and much more….

Download TeamCity 7.1.

Enjoy!

A few weeks ago we received some good news in that we were nominated as finalists for the JAX Innovation Awards. These awards celebrate the culture of innovation that makes the Java^TM ecosystem prosper and be successful. To reach the stage of finalist, the Java community nominates companies, technologies and people that feel deserve recognition for their innovation and contributions towards the platform. A jury then makes a shortlist of finalists for each category, and finally the community votes on these.

The finals took place on the 10th of July in San Francisco during the celebration of the JAX San Francisco Conference. We are excited to announce that JetBrains won the first prize in the category of Most Innovative Java Company for 2012.

We are extremely grateful for this award, and like to thank the Organization, the Jury, as well as everyone that voted for us. Most importantly however, we’d like to thank you, our users, our customers, for believing in us during the past decade and helping shape our products.

We still have a lot more in us and many surprises up our sleeves to continue to help developers, well, develop with pleasure!

Thank you all!
JetBrains Team

One more bug-fix update is available – TeamCity 7.0.4. This build comes with a number of general fixes, addresses a few performance issues, and additionally introduces one small feature – an ability to fail a build based on statements from dotCover coverage with “Fail build on metric” build failure condition (TW-21111).

To see the complete list of fixed issues, please refer to the release notes.
Download the build and share your feedback with us.
Enjoy!

This summer we will be visiting two User Groups in Switzerland to talk about some of our tools among other things.

The events are organized in collaboration with the local User Groups of Berne and Lucerne:

If you’d like to attend the event, I’d recommend you sign up as places are limited.

Berne

Date: Tuesday 3rd July – 6 to 9 pm

Topics:

ReSharper Tips’n’ Tricks

Real World MVC

Registration, Location and more info: User Group Web Site

Lucerne

Date: Wednesday 4th July – 6 to 8:30 pm

Topics:

ALM with JetBrains Tools (covering TeamCity, YouTrack et al.)

Real World MVC

Registration, Location and more info: User Group Web Site

All registrations are handled directly by the user groups. Please contact them (via their web site) if you have any issues.

Hope to see you there!

Bug-fix update for TeamCity is now available. This build comes with tuned performance and addresses a number of problems of different importance.
As usual we recommend everyone to upgrade to the new build. You can find the complete list of changes in release notes.

Download the build and share your feedback with us.

Happy building!

Today we proudly present you TeamCity 7.0, it’s here, it’s ready for you to download. In this release we’ve been focusing on the whole range of aspects that are vital for clear, smooth and controlled continuous integration and modern build management.

The key new features introduced in TeamCity 7 include:

• Build agent pools: Forget those days when there were no agents available for your project because all of them were occupied by builds from other projects. Get hold of your own set of agents: just for your project!
  
• Typed parameters: Present build parameters clearer in Run Custom Build dialog – use check boxes, selection, field controls with descriptions and validation to make sure those who launch custom build have the right idea of what kind of parameters they change. Safely add password field to this dialog: its value will be kept secret and will never appear in any TeamCity files, such as logs, in unscrambled form.
  
• Build Chains: It doesn’t matter whether you call it a “pipeline” or a chain, the general idea is almost the same and it gained a lot of interest lately. Four years ago TeamCity first introduced build chains and they have come a long way of improvements since then, most importantly you can now take a closer look at the chains in your project – all spread before your eyes.
  
• Build failure conditions: All tests pass, but the resulting build is twice bigger then the last successful? Or almost not covered by tests? Or has a shameful load of duplicates? Now you have a way to nip these situations in the bud: just tell TeamCity how “good” you want your builds to be, and it’ll mark those not fitting the condition as failed.
• Incremental builds: Following best software development practices, like keeping your modules as independent as possible, can sometimes give you unexpected new benefits. In this case we’re talking about faster builds. Why run all tests in the whole project when we can get the same result by running only tests affected by a change and take the result of building the rest of the modules from previous build?
• REST API: A long-standing feature request to allow build configuration editing via REST has finally been implemented. Now you can get complete settings of a build configuration or template via REST and change them as you need. Moreover you can create and delete build configurations, as well as projects and VCS roots.
• NuGet: Not only TeamCity can build NuGet packages, install them, or publish to whatever feed you want, it can also be a NuGet server itself!
• ReSharper Inspections: Famous ReSharper Inspections are now available on the server side too. Dead code has no chance to slip in unnoticed.
• and more…

Happy building!