Some More on TeamCity

After having used it for a few weeks, I have this to say following my last post:

1. Great Support! We've had a couple of issues with Teamcity, some because our owns unit tests "maliciously" killed all java processes as a form of cleanup, and this killed the TeamCity Build Agents, and some other problems related to which version of the JVM was to be used. The TeamCity support staff and developers were extremely helpful and responsive, and aided us to get a stable Continuous Integration system up and running.
2. Enjoyable UI - the AJAX UI is usually very responsive, and rather feature-complete. It gives easy access to builds, projects, a sane way to manage settings and source control bindings, and a quick way to access the full log for every individual build (can be quite a few megs!) What I am missing is the one specific feature - I want the UI to clearly spell out the name of the person who broke the build (and speak it very loudly using text-to-speech, but that could be considered too esoteric to be included in the main build but rather implemented as a plugin).
3. Impressive code duplication finder - buggy at first, it now semi-stabilized. While we haven't had the time yet to actually work with it and remove duplications from our code base, it's just a matter of internal priorities at Delver. The power this gives a developer that wishes to improve his code base is huge.
4. VC integration - a bit less smooth than the other features. It's mostly worked for me, but sometimes it didn't. The Personal Build feature is very attractive, but I found one major problem using it: I ran a personal build that succeeded, but then it failed to automatically merge the code. I don't know if anything can be done about this - I can GetLatest before running the build, but the content of the branch may still change, and unless the merge is automatic human will be needed to solve it. However, I think it's a powerful tool that should work most of the time.

 

That's it for now. All in all, great product - keep it up JetBrains.