You can schedule builds in Orcas

re: You can schedule builds in Orcas

vikasgoyal77 — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 07:44:15 GMT

Thanks for the feature Buck.

http://DotNetWithMe.blogspot.com

vikas goyal

re: You can schedule builds in Orcas

jmanning — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 08:48:49 GMT

random thought fodder (mainly DST) for the next blog post:

- it says "local" time - local to which? client? build machine? database machine?

- the screen shot says "Eastern Standard GMT-5" - does it really mean "Eastern with DST" (GMT-5 sometimes, GMT-4 other times) or is DST not a factor?

- If I schedule for 2:30am, do I get 2 builds on one day of the year and no builds on that other day (DST switches)?

- what if I want to schedule it for a UTC time (say, 6am UTC)?

- what if the timezone changes on the relevant machine(s) (build machine or database)? Since it's not going off of UTC, this seems relevant.

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re: You can schedule builds in Orcas

Jarle Nygård — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 15:30:49 GMT

"A scheduled build will not be queued if no changes have been checked in since the previous build"

Does this mean that if we have a "nightly build" that does a whole lot more than just compile a bunch of code it will not run unless somebody has checked-in some code?

That would make this useless to 3 of our builds...

We need to deploy new databases on a regular schedule and we do so by creating a new database each day, named after the day. So we have a MONDAY and a TUESDAY etc. database. These are updated with scripts and the code is compiled and deployed to test servers.

This needs to happen very single day (Mon-Fri).

We currently use Windows Scheduled Tasks to make this happen.

re: You can schedule builds in Orcas

buckh — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 17:56:08 GMT

James, those are good questions. What we do is display the time to the user in the user's local (client) timezone. The server stores it as an offset from midnight in local time on the data tier, so the data tier's clock is the one used for all scheduling decisions. We use local time so that the builds will still occur at the proper time when DST changes. If the time were stored in UTC in the data tier, the builds would be off by an hour when DST changes.

Of course, if your data tier is in a locale that observes daylight savings time differently than the client, there will be some discrepancies. In fact, the data tier, client, and build machine could all be in different locales each with different DST rules. We chose not to address that.

The scheduled build is executed once per day. Once it has executed, changing the clock within the same day or changing the scheduled build time will not trigger another build for that day.

Buck

re: You can schedule builds in Orcas

buckh — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 18:00:19 GMT

Jarle, yes if no checkins have occurred, then the build will not occur.

We had at one point considered having an option to "force" a build even there had been no checkin. We didn't have data on the usefulness of that. We'll re-examine that decision as a result of your feedback.

Thanks,

Buck

re: You can schedule builds in Orcas

Jarle Nygård — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 11:07:22 GMT

Excellent! :)

Wow, how good does it feel to be able to give direct feedback and actually have somebody is is someone give direct feedback in a matter of hours? If just all companies and dev team were like this... :)

Thanx a bunch for listening.

Cheers,

Jarle

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re: You can schedule builds in Orcas

Roy Osherove — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:46:58 GMT

You should consider allowing both "Build on check in" and "nightly". The two are not mutually exclusive..

re: You can schedule builds in Orcas

buckh — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 04:59:55 GMT

Roy, what would you expect to be different about the nightly build? We debated this when we put in the feature, but we decided that since there wasn't going to be a way to provide a different set of parameters to the build, there didn't seem to be much of a point.

I'm interested to know what you have in mind.

Buck

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re: You can schedule builds in Orcas

Morten — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 12:40:12 GMT

Hello Buck,

I have to second Jarle's motion to have a "Force Build" option.

In our scenario, we have a CI build that is fired on every checkin. This builds the entire solution and runs all unit tests. What we want to do on the nightly build is to build the entire solution, run all unit tests, run code analysis and fire up FitNesse to run a bunch of acceptance tests. So the two builds are totally independent of each other, and we need the nightly build to be run regardless of whether or not anything has been checked in since the last build. (With our CI approach, that would probably mean that the nightly build would never be run).

Morten

re: You can schedule builds in Orcas

buckh — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 16:48:59 GMT

Morten,

In your case, your scenario will work as you want. Whether or not the CI build definition has been built today has no effect on whether the nightly build definition will be built. The only thing that matters for the nightly build definition is whether there have been any checkins. The fact that the CI build has occurred actually has no effect on whether the nightly build runs. So, they are independent like you need them to be.

I hope you'll be able to try out beta 1!

Buck

re: You can schedule builds in Orcas

buckh — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 16:59:32 GMT

Jarle,

I apologize for not following up earlier. Morten's comment reminded me that I should write more about how it turned out.

Before I tell you the background, I want to put forth a workaround. You could have the nightly build always modified a text file that's mapped for the build definition at the end of the build (if it's not mapped in the build definition's workspace, it won't trigger the build). That would have the effect of guaranteeing that there is always a checkin that will force the next night's build to run, regardless of whether there are any other checkins. You could do this with a couple of Exec task calls to tf.exe.

When your question came up, I went to the team at that time, and we discussed whether to provide a checkbox that would force a build. For Orcas, the decision was made not to change it. Much of the reasoning has to do with minimizing changes to Orcas, as the development was done and this would be viewed as a new feature (build scheduling already was completed as a post-develompment DCR, and we encountered a lot of resistance to changing it further). If there's enough feedback from beta 1 on it, we could revisit the decision. But in order to get approved, it would need to be a lot of feedback from customers wanting this.

Buck

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