Continuous Integration, for those who aren't familiar with it, is the simple idea that your code should be continually being built. Every change you check into source control should get compiled, packaged, and tested on all your target platforms - automatically, of course. It's a great way to catch build errors in other configurations or on platforms other than the one you're developing on.
Many people go for CI servers built around CruiseControl, but after researching the options when I was back at NaturalMotion, I selected, used, and fell in love with Zutubi Pulse. So, it's now running on GDNet, a nice complement to our issue tracker and source control system.
Pulse is great. It's got an easy-to-understand but elegant and powerful web UI, built-in support for a bunch of external build systems (such as MSBuild), it's trivial to install... but the best thing, really, is the support. Zutubi is, as far as I can tell, two guys in Australia - Jason and Daniel. Yet, between them, forum questions get answered within minutes, with detailed and helpful responses; feature requests get logged and show up in a point release a week later; their JIRA instance is publicly accessible; and they still, somehow, find time to blog about build systems, agile programming, unit testing, and so on. If I ever meet these men, I am buying them a drink. Each.
Two further things that are more relevant to the average GDNetter: Firstly, they have free licenses available for open-source projects and for small teams (2 people / 2 projects), and secondly, I'm told they've got a number of game developers as customers... so they've got quite a lot of familiarity with our use-cases, and Pulse handles things like '4GB of art assets' pretty well. I'd definitely recommend checking Pulse out if you've got the hardware to spare.
The other nice thing about having a CI server is it provides an authoritative 'release provider' within the GDNet LAN: a clear, single source for new releases of the site software to be deployed to our machines. I've done some work tonight to have Pulse capture the executables and content directories as zip-file 'artifacts;' next I'll get MSBuild to actually stamp the executables with the build number, and I'll look into ways to quickly and efficiently deploy the artifacts to the machines that need them. Eventually, doing a new release of the GDNet site will just be a question of clicking a 'trigger' button, and watching the progress bar tick for a bit [grin]
