Continuous Integration - with what to start: CruiseControl.NET vs TeamCity vs Visual Studio Team System [closed]

Question

I'm new to Continuous Integration. I want an advice with what tool should I start deal with. I see that this is the biggest tools right now: CruiseControl.NET, TeamCity and Visual Studio Team System.

I'm using this tools: Visual Studio 2010, Mercurial, NAnt, NUnit.

Answer 1

I would recommend TeamCity - free for up to three agents, 20 projects and 20 users, runs a variety of builders (NAnt included) and can parse NUnit results (Hudson can do all this too I believe, however I have no used it, so I can't speak from experience).

Having worked with TFS, TeamCity, Bamboo and CC.NET, I can say that TC was the easiest to get up and running, the simplest to deploy multiple remote agents, get insight into builds, and integrated seamlessly with jabber, email, visual studio, windows task tray etc. Just felt good.

Answer 2

Both TeamCity and CruiseControl.NET will work fine for this set of tools. Also you can consider alternatives :

• Hudson (Free, UI-based setup)
• Visual Studio Team System (expensive (about 6000$), UI-based setup)
• CruiseControl.NET (Free, Xml-based setup)
• TeamCity (Professional Edition of TeamCity is free, UI-based setup)

The difference is :

1) Pricing. CruiseControl.NET and Hudson are free and open source, while Visual Studio Team System and TeamCity cost money (However Professional Edition of TeamCity is also free).

2) Set up process. All systems have pretty simple UI to get up continuous integration processes except Cruise Control .NET - it uses XML-based configuration files instead (Example)

Essentially all you need from integration system is just to run nant script on commit event and show report. Every continuous integration system can do this. I would recommend Hudson because it is:

• Free
• Easy to set up