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Book review: Continuous Integration in .NET

Manning Publications provided me a free electronic copy of their book “Continuous Integration in .NET” that I was interested in. If you have started with automated unit testing, continuous integration (CI) is the next major step to increase the quality of the software that you deliver.

This book is excellent to get you introduced in CI for .NET and to get started with a set of tools (not only from Microsoft) such as:

  • CruiseControl.NET, TeamCity and Team Foundation Server (2010) as CI servers
  • MS build as build automation tool
  • NUnit, MS Test as unit testing framework
  • PartCover as test coverage tool
  • White, Selenium and FiNesse for integration, functional, acceptance tests
  • FxCop (Code Analysis), NDepend for compiled code analysis
  • StyleCop for source code analysis
  • Sandcastle as documentation generation tool
  • MS Setup, WiX and MS Deploy as setup / deployment tools
  • Etc.

I read programming books on a Kindle app for iPad / iPhone rather that on a computer, so I appreciate that the book is easy to read, with handy screenshots that avoid you to install/use the tools on a computer to get the idea about them.

The book covers the basics of each area and tool, detailing some good and not so good things of each tool, and providing examples of use with a sample project. If you have decided that you are going to stick to free tools, you can skip some sections (and the same applies if you have decided to use only Microsoft tools).

But once you have decided which of the above area(s) of CI and tools you are going to use, likely you will need other books/docs to get deeper. For example, for unit testing I recommend The Art of Unit Testing, also from Manning, but wait until the second edition is published. If you decide to use Team Foundation Server (TFS) version 2012, I recommend the free book Testing for Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio 2012. For other tools, you will need to use the documentation of the product.

The book is also a good resource to get your team introduced to CI is that is your scenario. Many developers tend to be much more focused on the code / manual testing than on automated testing, let alone on continuous integration which maybe they ignore at all. Maybe with books like this they realize the spectrum of things that can be done automatically and in a continuous fashion.