CruiseControl.net and Mono

I have set up CruiseControl.net (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ccnet/) on Mono for building our OpenPetra.org project, which is quite a big project.

Here are the steps I followed, and my config files so that people can benefit from it:

Here is some advice how to change the ccnet.exe.config to make it work for Mono: http://markmail.org/message/uyfqysd55u4xqhfs; main things are to change the xsl paths' backslash to forward slash, and to replace ColoredConsoleAppender with ConsoleAppender, and to remove mappings for the ConsoleAppender.

You can see my modified ccnet.exe.config, and also the ccnet.config for OpenPetra here in the online git repository:

http://openpetraorg.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=openpetraorg/openpetraorg;a=tree;f=csharp/ICT/PetraTools/ContinuousIntegration

You will also find a cruisecontrol.sh which I use as a init.d script for starting and stopping my CruiseControl server.

I had to install Mono XSP from the Lenny backports repository, to get Mono 2.x. It was also important to install sendmail, otherwise the EmailProvider would obviously not work (which took me quite a while to notice).

apt-get -t lenny-backports install mono-xsp
apt-get install sendmail sendmail-bin

Then I had a nasty problem with the logging. After a failed build, I had this exception:

[OpenPetraOrg:ERROR] Publisher threw exception: ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.CruiseControlException: Unable to read the contents of the file: /home/timop/CruiseControl.NET/Server/OpenPetraOrg/Artifacts/nant-results-b2f2a299-05c5-42a6-a311-24df30a59b9a.xml ---> System.NotImplementedException: The requested feature is not implemented.
at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.Tasks.FileTaskResult.ReadFileContents () [0x00000]
--- End of inner exception stack trace ---
at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.Tasks.FileTaskResult.ReadFileContents () [0x00000]
at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.Tasks.FileTaskResult.get_Data () [0x00000]
at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.Publishers.XmlIntegrationResultWriter.WriteTaskResults (IIntegrationResult result) [0x00000]
at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.Publishers.XmlIntegrationResultWriter.WriteBuildElement (IIntegrationResult result) [0x00000]
at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.Publishers.XmlIntegrationResultWriter.Write (IIntegrationResult result) [0x00000]
at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.Publishers.XmlLogPublisher.Execute (IIntegrationResult result) [0x00000]
at ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.Tasks.TaskBase.Run (IIntegrationResult result) [0x00000]
[OpenPetraOrg:ERROR] Unable to build email message: ThoughtWorks.CruiseControl.Core.CruiseControlException: Unable to read the contents of the file: /home/timop/CruiseControl.NET/Server/OpenPetraOrg/Artifacts/nant-results-b2f2a299-05c5-42a6-a311-24df30a59b9a.xml --->  System.NotImplementedException: The requested feature is not implemented.

After some searching, I realised that the log file had become quite big, and in the CruiseControl.net code in FileTaskResult.cs the function ReadFileContents would call MemoryFailPoint, but this class has not been implemented yet in Mono 2.x (http://anonsvn.mono-project.com/viewvc/tags/mono-2-4-2-2/mcs/class/corlib/System.Runtime/MemoryFailPoint.cs).

My solution was to download the sources of Mono, and modify MemoryFailPoint.cs to not throw that NotImplementedException, but just stay quiet. I then copied the resulting file (eg. mono-2.4.2.3/mcs/class/lib/net_2_0/mscorlib.dll) to my server with the CruiseControl.net, to /usr/lib/mono/2.0/mscorlib.dll

Now CruiseControl.net works quite nicely, though I have not played with NUnit yet, and there are more things to explore...