Gated Check-ins and Team Foundation Server

There was a discussion lately on the ALT.NET mailing list about the merits of NAnt versus MSBuild. This discussion expanded to encompass the various build engines there are outt here such as CruiseControl.NET (open source from ThoughtWorks) and TeamCity (free for non-Enterprise use, by JetBrains).

Someone mentioned the "private build" feature of TeamCity where by you ask the build server to do a build of what you currently have but without actually checking in your code to the source tree.

I pointed out that this feautre is also supported by Team Foundation Server through an open source framework exisits called Gauntlet (http://www.opengauntlet.org/). The elevator pitch from the Gauntlet web site is as follows:

"OpenGauntlet...mimics a fundamental feature of Microsoft's internal development system (codenamed Gauntlet), also known as "Gated Checkins". It avoids the problems associated with large development teams whereby a single developer will check in non-compiling code, which subsequently causes delays in the development life cycle as the team waits for the issues to be resolved. It can also be configured to disallow check ins if the proposed code changes break the unit tests. The central principle is that users are not allowed to check code directly into source control. Instead, they shelve their changes with a specific naming prefix when they are ready to check some changes in, and OpenGauntlet unshelves their changes into a temporary workspace, checks the changes compile and pass unit tests, and then checks the changes into source control under the requesting developer's username."

I've not taken the plunge with setting this up yet, I have an upgrade to TFS2008 to do first, but it looks like a must have. Here's to less "red" builds!