CC.NET and the mystery of failing web deployment projects

If something has gone wrong, and it is really tough to figure out the reason, try looking at the situation from the different angle. Could it be, that there are two separate and simple problems that play well together in distorting the symptoms?

This has been the case with the Web Deployment Projects failing spontaneously on the CC.NET. Deployment projects do really fail under VS 2008 under some weird circumstances (that's the first problem), but the real cause was simple build timeout on the integration server (second problem).

And I've got way too carried away by the complexity of the first problem (and ease of reproducing it locally) and didn't even check server log (CC.NET separates build logs from the server log, which holds higher-level messages) for some other hints (i.e.: "Process timed out:...")

That was a good lesson.

Comments

[Joannes Vermorel]

Maybe it's time to put a feature request on CC.NET to make sure the timeout error get probably reported in the build summary when it happens :-)

[Rinat Abdullin]

Joannes,

The build summary is being generated by the combined XML output coming from the different CC.NET tasks being executed. And the timeout error comes from the CC.NET task itself (exec MSBuild in that case). Pushing server-side errors down to the specific build is possible (i.e.: combination of the XSLT and publication task) but would hurt the logics of the solution.

And unfortunately I do not see any nice solution to this situation that would be worth filing as a feature request.