Automated builds and deployment

Seeing Eric Ries videos from Oredev 2009 got me inspired to really look into a solution for doing automated test and deployment.

The Lean Startup: a Disciplined Approach to Imagining and Designing New Products
Just-In-Time Scalability: Agile Methods to Support Massive Growth

My first goal is to find a way to build a solution, run unit, integration and web tests.
I went out and search for the tools I wanted to use and here is my list.

Build server: Team City
Unit testing framework: XUnit
Web testing framework: Watin Watin
Build script: Phantom Phantom

In the heart of the build we need a build script. First I looked at MsBuild and NAnt and they are built on XML, and XML is not a good way to define builds. I've worked with MS Build and it's not intuitive. After a while I found Rake, a ruby build language but it needs ruby installed on the server so when a college of mine mensioned Boobs (boo build system) and Phantom I had to look them up. Both of the frameworks are built on boo with rake like syntax.

My choice landed on Phantom. Jeremy Skinner has created a great start of a new build script system. It's easy to extend by coding C#

I've added xunit support for phantom and commited it to github and its now merged into the main branch. You can find it at github http://github.com/EmilCardell/Phantom

Next I'm looking into IIS7 support so web tests can be set up automatically.