New beta user. Really impressed with the tool thus far and I'm looking forward to diving in more. This is such a quantum leap from the out of the box tfs stuff it's not funny.
Here's my question.
Frequently in our development lifecycle we have requests to deploy our latest known good build to a side test environment to test performance or some other feature. This deployment really doesn't constitute a new stage in the development process as much as just another place to give people access to our code that is not part of the bulk of qa testing (and the strange data they create as part of their job).
How would one reccomend doing this using the tool? Is it even possible? Maybe we continue using finalbuilder server for that piece and just have it grab the code from the continua build repo?
If it's a once off deployment, then having a stage does the deployment when it runs (via a manual promotion, the previous stage needs to be set to not auto promote) is a way to do this. That is how we handle our builds, ie the stages we have are
Build - compile etc Obfuscate - obfuscate sensitive bits Test - run unit tests Package - creates the installers and registers them as artifacts Deploy - runs a finalbuilder script to ftp the installers to the website.
Obviously that doesn't help if you need to do this multiple times for a single build, or deploy to various servers at different times etc. So I guess you could have your build process put the output files in a known place, and then have another project that allows you to take those files and push them to where ever they need to be.
This is an area that we do have plans to improve, with a Release Management module which will handle the management of deploying builds to machines etc. Unfortunately that module is a long way from done and won't be in v1, although we are planning an agressive release cycle after v1 (basically as soon as a new feature is done it will be released).