The CruiseControl.Net tasks are divided in ‘Projects’.  There are several kinds of projects.  This is a possible list of projects on the server :

• The Continuous Integration Build of an application
• The Deployment Build of an application
• Automatic generation of buildscripts for the Visual Studio projects of an application
• …

The technical project leader or the architect/designer could also define specific projects on the server.

e.g. only checking FxCop rules, or only run the unit testing,...

Projects are defined in the XML way in ccnet.config.  It just a list of projects defined one after the other one.  But keep in mind that those projects could be run parallel (and they will).

For each project you have to create a <Project> element with following attributes:

• Name
• Work folders
• Links with source control
• Running scripts.  These are Nant Targets who can be separated in activities
• Triggers
• …

The official documentation of the <Project> element can be found here .

Continuous Integration Build

It’s a good thing to analyze and describe each project in the first place in a Use Case.

After this, you are able to create a sequence diagram :

Basic configuration of a Continuous Integration Build project

Here we will describe the first step for our configuration.  It’s very basic.  We just at our project and source control.  We will add other features like tasks, publishers,... later on.

So first create a working directory for your build server.  We propose for this ‘c:\buildserver’.

Secondly we will add the project to the cruise control server.  To do this, open the ccnet.config file in the C:\Program Files\CruiseControl.NET\server directory.

<cruisecontrol>
    <project
        name="ProjectX"
        webURL="http:\\localhost\ccnet"
        workingDirectory="C:\Buildserver">
        <sourcecontrol type="vss" autoGetSource="true" applyLabel="false">
            <executable>C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual SourceSafe\Common\Vss\template\win32\SS.EXE</executable>
            <project>$/Projects\ProjectX\xxxxx.ProjectX</project>
            <username>VSSUser</username>
            <password>VSSPws</password>
            <ssdir>\\path to VSS DB\SourceDB</ssdir>
            <workingDirectory>Buildserver\ProjectX</workingDirectory>
            <cleanCopy>true</cleanCopy>
        </sourcecontrol>
    </project>
</cruisecontrol>