Best practices for using SmartAssembly with a build server

j326807h

I am new to SmartAssembly and I am looking for the best practices for using Smart Assembly with TFS and a build server.

A few items about our setup.
* Multiple developers using Visual Studio 2008.
* TFS 2010 with a dedicated build server.
* Smart Assembly 6.6.3.41 is loaded on developers machines as well as the build server.

The following is how I believe it should work.
On the developers machine a new Smart Assembly project is created to post process an existing Visual Studio project. The Smart Assembly project is saved to the Visual Studio project folder and added to the Visual Studio project so that it is now managed via TFS. The Visual Studio project is then manually edited so that it also calls the SA project when being built.

A new build definition is created for the project/solution created above. The build server will use project file created on the developers machine when it brings down the source code for the build.


Any guidance that you may give would be greatly appreciated.

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Chris.Allen

Please take a look at:

http://www.red-gate.com/products/dotnet ... am-package

When you purchase, Smartassembly as a development team package- it imposes this architecture which is both cost-effective and integrates well with most standard development practices.

j326807h

Thanks for the reply. The link is towards a marketing/sales page and not really what I need. Currently we have 1 pro server and 10 dev cals. What I am trying to find out how to incorporate the packaged produced on a dev machine so that it flows through and automated build process.

Chris.Allen

It's a little bit simpler than the way you first described in the sense that it's independent of your 'source control system' i.e. TFS.

All the obfuscation happens on the build server- so someone has to manually configure- this gives more details:

http://www.red-gate.com/supportcenter/C ... ithMSBuild


Then, very simply, each developer can access error reports when they have a copy of the smartassembly project. Obviously this is most sensibly managed with the same source control system you use - but it doesn't have to be.

I have purposefully spoken in very basic terms here- there is more to be said but I just wanted to get the basics across. I hope it has helped.