An Experiment in Scotch

So I’m tak­ing a deep dive into TFS and con­tin­u­ous inte­gra­tion which is kind of like eat­ing 5 orders of Pin­tos ‘N Cheese from Taco Bell, going home, drink­ing a glass of Meta­mu­cil, stuff­ing one end of the gar­den hose up your ass and the other up one nos­tril and then prac­tic­ing Kun­dalini yoga by breath­ing in one nos­tril and out the other in an attempt to not asphyx­i­ate on your own methane, i.e. it’s going to lead to learn­ing and self-enlightenment but it’s going to get messy in the process. I digress.

So far, as much as it pains me to admit it (and trust me, to utter even one lit­tle pos­i­tive thing about a Microsoft source con­trol prod­uct at this point is pretty painful) it’s been a rea­son­ably easy process. If source con­trol and code is going to be tightly inte­grated, they might as well make an auto­matic build process that does all the work for you and to a cer­tain degree, TFS does this. It’s pretty easy to get a basic CI process up and run­ning, much eas­ier than the sim­i­lar CruiseControl.Net imple­men­ta­tion would be since with TFS, you don’t have to write any gaw­daw­ful XML con­fig­u­ra­tion file by hand.

There have been sev­eral hic­cups but none of those are directly attrib­ut­able to TFS. So here’s to you, TFS. By hav­ing tightly inte­grated projects, solu­tions and source con­trol, you’ve man­aged to make con­tin­u­ous inte­gra­tion mostly unpainful.