Well I’ve got to say as an EX finalbuilder server 7 fan boy and having tested beta editions of Continua since 12th Sep 2012, Continua is a significant improvement over Vsoft previous build server software. Mind you, the adjustment in process takes some time to learn, because there are so many great features in Continua.
A decision point for me, was the Unit testing results and formatting that’s just baked into Continua, making it crystal clear what’s happing with your software quality. I’m not even bothering to use HTML/XSL to format Nunit results, which was a previous PITA process I don’t do.
The other really neat feature is the build agents (windows services) that you can run on developers PC’s, so those “unique” software tools often used by the industry don’t have to be installed on a build server (and licensed!). That’s a massive cost savings in licensing, not to mention a very smart way of using the UBBER fast developer workstations as build workhorses.
While I don’t see any system tray’s, there is email (sigh) and XMPP (think open standard messaging [chat apps]) support, so theoretically with the matching corporate communication server, you could pipe the notifications to a mobile device (mixed blessing). Through the forum posts, you can deduce Vsoft staff are ramping up to follow many other SOA suppliers and use Web Hooks to connect Continua to many other services. I believe they have a module plugin architecture under the bonnet, so I can only see things getting better.
However the clincher for me is the speed of support by the Staff as Vsoft. Continua is their new shiny software product and they are ultra fast and finding, fixing and improving the software to make our lives easier.
a) Nothing in life is guaranteed, however if you find you are unhappy, we will work hard to resolve that. The two products are very different, so the migration from FBServer to Continua CI is not a simple one.
b) Not yet. We do have cctray support, however to get it working, you have to enable the Guest account and grant view access to configurations. It’s not ideal, and not something we will be advising. The plan is to produce our own tray app like the one for FBServer. That work is planned as soon as we can, it’s tied to other server side work (rest api) which is also being worked on for a future update.
c) As long as you have .NET 4 framework (full, not client profile), IIS and asp.net installed then yes, it should pretty much just work. We have put a lot of effort into the installer to try and detect when things that are needed are not available etc.
I think I will snapshot the build box and put continua on it.
As I understand it:
- Continua will run our FB7 projects as is, correct? - Continua support perforce, and the other animals (unit test frameworks, etc) that FB7 supports, yes?
IOW: With FB Server, we just install FB Server and drop in our FB project, set some triggers, and we are done.
Can Continua work that way, or must we go about fiddling it?
(We just did a huge build migration, and can’t swallow another big change this month!)
- Continua will run our FB7 projects as is, correct?
No. Continua CI is not a replacement for FinalBuilder (FB), it’s a replacement for FinalBuilder Server (FBS). Both FBS and Continua CI need FB installed to run FB projects. For Continua CI, FB needs to be installed on the same machine as the Agent.
We do have an importer that will import your setups from FBS to Continua CI, but because of the differences between the two products, it’s no possible to do a 100% import. I recommend reading through the documentation, in partcular :
- Continua support perforce, and the other animals (unit test frameworks, etc) that FB7 supports, yes?
Yes, Perforce is supported for detecting changes and getting the source. Continua CI is very different to FBS when it comes to managing source code, with FBS you are pretty much left to your own devices once FBS detects a change. Continua CI caches the source on the server and farms it out to agents that need it during the build (it’s highly configurable). At the moment, Continua CI only needs read access to the version control, it does not do any commits. If you need to make changes to the source code and commit at build time, then you need to have the perforce client on the agent machine (which may or may not be the same as the server machine) and have a FinalBuilder script manage the commit.
I forgot to mention that your FinalBuilder projects would probably need some work done as well to get them to play nicely with Continua CI. This is because each build done by Continua CI is done in a clean workspace, so use of variables to manage paths etc is important. I’m working on a new blog post about this at the moment, will try and get it finished over the weekend.
I understand (and have) that Continua is a replacement for FBS. That is fine.
I may end up installing the FBS demo to get me through the next couple weeks. I lack resources (time) to adapt FBS projects. If I have a running FBS system, can Continua go onto it also, so I can get running quickly and play with continua in parallel?
A note: I see I have been sloppy with nomenclature.
To clarify:
- I understand that continua is a replacement for FBS, and that FB is still needed // fine!
- While FBS is a drop in for a working FB project, it sounds like when using continua that the FB project may require tweaking // this last part is a bit scary to me, as we just did a huge polishing to our FB project and have no more time for weeks to come to fiddle it.
- The systray app in FBS is really popular here. I would have a tough sell getting folks to part with it.
Thank you all! We will take it from here!
FB and FBS rock! We expect continua does also, and hope to find out in the months to come!