R – how to automate or facilitate multiplatform build/test before committing

Having Project A build is straight forward. In the publishing phase write a file to a network drive.

Project B can use the files system source control block to monitor the network file system, and trigger a build based on the change from Project A. When it is done it writes another file to the file system (different dir).

Project C is using the file system source control to watch for changes from Project B.

All pretty simple.

If you don't have a shared file system you can also use ftp, scp, or http to move trigger files around.

If you prefer you can trigger a build using the web interfaces, called from the Project A and Project B publishing phases.

Wrt the questions in the comments, you can get information on Project B failing (at least) two different ways.

One would be to have a Project B under CC that served as a proxy for the remote Project B. The remote Project B would write a file during the publishing phase and in the file indicate if it passed or failed. The proxy-B project would monitor that file and during its "build" phase would read the file and pass or fail based on the contents. Project C now just monitors proxy-B using CC's BuildStatus element.

Another way to approach the problem would be to replace Project B under CC.net with CC's DistributedBuilder which uses JavaSpaces to distribute builds to remote agents: http://confluence.public.thoughtworks.org/display/CC/Using+distrib+from+the+CruiseControl+contrib

In the distributed approach Project B would still be run on the windows machine but the DistributedBuilder would run the script remotely and then bring the results back to the CC server.

NAnt takes quite a bit of work to build C++ effectively. It really is a .NET build system through and through. We're building our title to four C++ platforms plus a set of .NET tools, and it took a while to bend NAnt to our needs. For example, NAnt's C++ dependency analysis is so broken that we had to write our own. And it has a lot of perf issues that we had to go hack away at it to fix.

So don't jump in with both feet on this. Do some preliminary testing to make sure it really can do what you want and get a feel for how much you'll have to modify it for C++.

Also, we're using CruiseControl.NET also for some NUnit stuff we have built into one of our tools that drives the game we're developing. Very happy with this, it was brain-dead easy to set up. Big thumbs up here.

At a previous gig I used Final Builder in the exact scenario you describe - on the build server. Local builds were done using Visual Studio. It's a pretty awesome product that I'd seriously consider if you have a little money to spend. We had nothing but good results from it.

At my current company we went with NAnt because we didn't want to buy FB for every engineer on the team. We also didn't like how FB is closed source. So we're 100% Nant and are liking it. Just took some time to bang it into shape!