Introducing the PSBuild meta-runner (for .NET)

I’ve been working on a thing for a while now on my spare time, which hasn’t been all that much I’m sorry to say, that I got an idea for while I was writing the TeamCity meta-runner for semantic versioning, aka “the semver meta-runner”. If you don´t know what a meta-runner is or you’d like to […]

TeamCity: custom agent requirements

While I was working on another blog post I got to thinking about agent requirements. The reason was that I used PSGet to install a PowerShell module (Pester) onto the TeamCity agent server, i.e. I installed it globally. The downside of this approach was that I didn’t have a great story for knowing whether: the […]

Pester: Using TeamCity to run your tests

I’ve previously written blog posts about Pester. The first one was a general purpose overview. The second one was about working with modules and Pester. The whole, original, purpose for me using Pester was to get a bit of quality around a PS module I’ve written called TSR. So the last part of the whole […]

TeamCity Meta-Runner: Semantic Version Build Number

Look at that nice looking SemVer used as a build number in TeamCity. It’s not impossible to get something like that working for you with some script language of choice in a build-runner. However…I just happened to make mine public, as a meta-runner, and others can benefit from it. Note: You can download the meta-runner […]

PowerShell: Write-Verbose and Write-Debug without annoying word wrap

Recently I ran into an issue with the PowerShell runner in TeamCity. I wanted to use the Write-Verbose and Write-Debug cmdlets to conditionally output some messages. However I discovered that the output in the build log was anything but what I originally had planned. The messages where “cut off” or word-wrapped so to say in […]

Creating a TeamCity meta-runner

Starting with TeamCity 8.x you can now “extract” repetitive tasks into build runners, called meta-runners,  that you can re-use without the need for coding a plugin, or as JetBrains themselves like to put it: With a meta-runner, you can easily reuse existing runners, create new runners for typical tasks (e.g. publish to FTP, delete directory, […]

Pester: Unit Testing for PowerShell

Pester is a BDD inspired testing framework for PowerShell just like Jasmine is on the JavaScript side and RSpec is on the Ruby side for example (I do believe that JavaScript is one of the best comparisons for PowerShell though, it being a scripting language and all). This blog post is meant as a quick […]

Conditionally display TeamCity build progress messages

TeamCity has a number of notifications/messages that you can make use of to interact with the build script. One of them is the Build Progress Message which is shown on the project dashboard to provide sort of a UI hint to the user while the build is running, like this example: According to the TeamCity […]

Using TeamCity for ASP.NET development: Deploying

This is the third part of a blog post series on using TeamCity continuous integration server from JetBrains for asp.net development. Here are the links to the parts of the series: Installing/Configuring TeamCity for use with IIS MSBuild requirements for web package publishing Deploying via Web Deploy [this post] Backup (pre-deploy) 3. Deploying via Web […]

Web Deploy PowerShell: problems with encrypted passwords and .publishsettings files

Problem/Scenario While I was working on some samples for another blog post on the PowerShell  cmdlets that ships with web deploy 3 I discovered something that I think might be worth knowing about. This blog post will first describe the problem and then present a solution for the problem. Background The image above is meant […]