Contributing to CCNet

When I first started contributing to CCNet 1.5 years ago, CI was still a buzz. Now it's getting more and more main stream. Back in those days, there where not many CI-systems around. There was CruiseControl, Draco, and maybe some others. I do not know if Hudson already existed back than. Team System from MS surely wasn't.
The reason I started contributing was that although CCNet did his job, it was still very basic, (I started at version 1.0 RC1, which was .Net framework 1.1).
After all this time CCNet matured a lot, thanks to the many people sending patches and pointing out problems and so.

When I tell friends what I do, they often ask how much time I spent on it, and frankly I do not know exact. What I do know it's quite a lot. Some bugs / features are easy to do, others take several days or weeks to get done. Many say that I am crazy to spent so much time without getting paid, but I also learn a lot. And it takes only a few people with a bit of time to get this great tool further. It's either this, or spending $$$ on Team System.

These are the contributions I found the most valuable I made for CCNet :
° enhancing the e-mail publisher (notifications, e-mail adress lookup, custom subjects, ...)
° implement a change history overview
° improve some error messages, so you know where the error is and why
° show a build progress in the dashboard and cctray
° artifact clean up
° expose messages in the dashboard, so integration with other programs is better (BVC)
° a graphical build history overview
° publish source control exceptions

Expect a todo list in the next post ...

Some Intresting links :
CCNet Documentation
CCNet Issue page
CCNet in Action