>Using Team City to run “personal builds”

By Andreas Öhlund | Published: July 17, 2009

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Team City has a killer feature called remote run. This gives you the ability to test your changes on the build server before actually committing anything.

Why is this needed, you might ask? 

Let me try to explain with an example. I’ve recently committed some features to NServiceBus where the tests where using Sqlite for in memory testing of NHibernate mappings. The coding went smooth and all test where green “on my machine”. I’ve danced the checkin dance and finally committed the changes.

What do you think happened?

Well the “it works on my machine” devil paid me a visit and made sure that the Continuous Integration choked with a classic “Bad Image Format” exception. It turns out that the build agent over at http://teamcity.codebetter.com is 64-bit and that caused the NUnit test runner to fail because I’ve compiled against the x86 version of Sqllite. But before I’ve got this fixed I had caused 10 failed builds, I don’t have a x64 machine so I had to do trial and error debugging. And trust me repeatedly failing the build is a great way to piss off your fellow developers. If I had been using the “personal build” feature before I committed  this wouldn’t have happened.

To start using this feature do the following:

  1. Download the Team City Visual Studio plug in (login to your Team City server and click on “My Settings & Tools”)
  2. Download the CollabNet Subversion client and install it
  3. Open visual studio and
    1. Login to Team City (from the “Team City” menu)
    2. Click on “Remote run”
    3. Make sure subversion support is enabled (see picture below)

personal_build

That should be it. Another great “move” added to my check in dance!

Thanks to Tuna Toksoz for helping me with the Sqlite issue and reminding me of the “personal build” feature!

This entry was posted in NServiceBus, sqlite, Team City. Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.
  • Torbjørn

    >Great stuff. I've been looking forward to introducing TeamCity when I start my new job in a couple of weeks, but this feature I did not know about. Thanks!

  • Mikael Nordberg

    >I guess that the "Markoolio hat" looks good on you! :)

  • Andreas Öhlund

    >Hey Mikael that's correct. You have to be a Swede to understand the pain of having to wear an ugly hat worn by Markoolio (a semi crappy Swedish artist) a whole day. Don't ask how I got my hand on that hat… :)

  • Jens Pettersson

    >There's a "Markoolio hat" at work?! Don't make me check in some old NDepend assemblies again, now that I know of the hat! ;)

  • Welly Tambunan

    >Hi Andreas,

    Could you please tell me what version of TeamCity and SVN do you working on?

    Because i try but failed when loading svn.exe.

    Do you have a sugesstion for that?

  • Andreas Öhlund

    >@welly I'm on CollabNet Subversion Client 1.6.3 and TC Addin 4.5

    Hope this helps!