.NET developers have the luxury of using Visual Studio to write code. In my opinion, Visual Studio is one of best IDE in the market today. When you build your applications inside Visual Studio, you are using MsBuild to compile your code.
In the past, setting up a .NET build server without installing Visual Studio was challenging. Now that Microsoft is releasing more software as open source software, setting up a .NET build server can be accomplish with no issues.
In this post, I want to share the steps I took to setup a .Net continuous integration server running on Windows 2016.
First, launch a new instance with Windows 2016. I’m using AWS but any cloud provider would work as well.
After launching the new Windows 2016 server, it is time to install the necessary software to create our build server.
- Install Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.2 Developer Pack.
- Install Microsoft .NET Framework 4.6.2 Developer Pack.
- Install Microsoft Build Tools 2015.
- Install Jenkins 2.19.3.
- Copy files from developers’ machine located at C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v14.0\WebApplications to the same exact location on the new Windows 2016 server.
So far I have only tested this build server with a MVC website targeting .NET framework 4.5.2. Let me know if you run into any issues with this setup.
I hope to test different apps and also add support for .NET Core.
If you are using AWS, you can launch the same instance I have created by searching for “Jenkins Build Server 2.19.3”.