I spent most of the day yesterday getting CruiseControl.NET set up here at Pluralsight. We're always working on little projects (well, some larger than others) and making use of continuous integration seemed like a great idea. I was surprised how easy it was to get started with it. Craig was the impetus behind this effort, of course.
The best tip I can offer for you if you're thinking of installing and using CruiseControl.NET is to notice that there are actually two versions of the server, ccnet.exe and ccservice.exe. These do exactly the same thing, only one runs from the command line and the other runs in the background as a service. When you log in as an administrator and run ccnet.exe it naturally runs very smoothly. And this is where I started, with a very simple project that downloads code from one of our Subversion repositories. Once I got a NANT script working to build and deploy the code (I forgot how much I loved ANT; such a great idea for handling builds), I used ccnet to start testing the build under CruiseControl.
Once I debugged my NANT script and ccnet configuration, I tried flipping over to the service, and of course it simply didn't work. Naturally I wanted to run the service under a low-privilege account, but that account didn't have permissions to write to the CruiseControl log file, didn't have credentials to download files from our subversion repository, didn't have permissions to write those files to the working directory or deploy to the deployment folder. So here's the key: instead of debugging all of this using ccservice, just use runas to run a command prompt under the same user account that you plan to use for the service. Once I did that, I was able to figure out exactly what things I needed to do, from caching Subversion credentials in the user profile for the account, to setting up appropriate ACLs so the account could move files around and write to CruiseControl logs (which I also moved out of CruiseControl's program directory).
Once I got ccnet.exe working properly under the low-privilege account, I switched back to using the service, and voila! We now have a functioning installation of CruiseControl.
