Hello (cruel) World

Disclosure: I received a review copy of Continuous Integration in .NET from Manning. I don’t normally blog book reviews – mostly because it requires a specific skillset that I do not necessarily possess. However, due to some fortuitous timing I jumped on the chance to receive a review copy of Manning’s new title - Continuous Integration in .NET by Marcin Kawalerowicz and Craig Berntson. Background One of my many hats right now is version control manager of our team – a role I inherited rather than requested but one that nevertheless led to a deep interest in all things VC and build related. Due to the restructuring of MSDN’s licensing tiers our team is finally in the position to utilize Team Foundation Server as our version control repository. Having successfully sold the migration to the powers-that-be, and having previously started the team down the path to TDD, I’m interested in leveraging a number of incorporated technologies – at the very front of the pack is Continuous In

For the last few weeks I’ve been spending a decent portion of my time (jointly) planning and testing my team’s migration from VSS to TFS. While I’m a big fan of Microsoft’s development platform I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the simplicity of the migration process. Visual Studio 2010 brings with it a command line application called VSSConverter which takes an XML file and completes transfer of code and history with almost no input… almost ! The file looks like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <SourceControlConverter> <ConverterSpecificSetting> <Source name="VSS"> <VSSDatabase name="C:\TFSMigration\vss_database"></VSSDatabase> <UserMap name="c:\UserMap.xml"></UserMap> </Source> <ProjectMap> <Project Source="$/BillingProject/BillingProject/Client" Destination="$/BillingProject/Client"></Project>