Motivation

The current way of using MSBuild with CCNet suffers from two problems. They worsen with the number of projects that are in the build.

1. If you have many projects or a big team, you probably have lots of warnings or error messages. The standard build report of Dashboard for MSBuild is just a list with no obvious order or relation to certain projects. This makes it hard to find the reason for breaking builds and to get control over the warning plague.

2. The size of a log file gets pretty big. In our case the log of a single build, with verbositiy set to minimal, takes more than 4 megabytes, not including additional output like UnitTest results. On average we have a build every 15 minutes for 8 hours per days, so we need 4MB * 4 * 8 * 5 = 640 MB per week. The waste of space is bad but in the dawn of terabyte sized hardidisks not the real problem. The bigger problem is the waste of time! The xsl transformations on such large files can take quite some time. In our case Dashboard and CCNet server run on a well equipped machine. Nevertheless, requesting the build report page takes several seconds. Now imagine several developers simultaneously requesting the report after a build has finished ...

My first thought was to modify the supplied compile-msbuild.xsl transformation. After analyzing the xml log content I realized, that grouping errors and warnings by project was a pain and finally I failed. So I decided to write my own logger for MSBuild to make life for xsl transformations easier. In addition this solved also the space and time problem. The results were really satisfying. The log size shrunk from over 4MB to under 50KB and the xsl transformation run lightning fast. The build report is now structured, with nice summaries in the header

Features

• small log files == fast transformation
• if errors are present => no warnings are displayed; projects are sorted by build order.
• if no errors are present => projects are sorted by the number of warnings they produced
• no errors or warnings => happiness
• total number of projects and warnings are displayed in the header
• pathes are stripped from the working folder
• message is formated as Error | Message | File

How to use

1. Copy Rodemeyer.MsBuildToCCnet.dll to your \CruiseControl.NET\server folder
2. Copy msbuild2ccnet.xsl to your \CruiseControl.NET\webdashboard\xsl folder
3. Copy cruisecontrol.css to your \CruiseControl.NET\webdashboard folder
   • If you have modified the dashboards stylesheet, just copy the section-project, section-error, section-warning, error and warning style.
4. In your ccnet.config file locate the <msbuild> task. Change the <logger> node to

   <logger>c:\Program Files\CruiseControl.NET\server\Rodemeyer.MsBuildToCCNet.dll</logger>

   I highly suggest that you set the verbosity level to quiet or minimal to avoid excessive large log files!

   <buildArgs>/v:quiet /noconlog /p:Configuration=Debug</buildArgs>

5. In your dashboard.config file locate the <buildReportBuildPlugin> section. Remove the compile-msbuild.xsl and msbuild.xsl if present. Theses transformations are not compatible with the MsBuildToCCNet logger. Add the msbuild2ccnet.xsl transformation instead.

   <buildReportBuildPlugin>
       <xslFileNames>
           <xslFile>xsl\header.xsl</xslFile>
           <xslFile>xsl\msbuild2ccnet.xsl</xslFile>
           <xslFile>xsl\modifications.xsl</xslFile>
           [...]

Thats it! Just force a build and enjoy your new report.

Options

In the <buildArgs> you can specify the verbosity level for MSBuild. The MsBuildToCCNet logger interprets the different levels as follows:

Source

The complete source is attached to this page.

Updates