Hi Rob, I think I understand your frustration. Have you seen the Continuous Delivery book ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912/ )?
It will give you good ideas on how to drive and why you need a car at all. Have a look at the dashboard for CruiseControl.Net itself: http://build.nauck-it.de/ViewFarmReport.aspx This is what a working dashboard looks like. Click through each project, check the most recent build<http://build.nauck-it.de/server/build.nauck-it.de/project/CruiseControl.NET-1.8-dev/ViewLatestBuildReport.aspx>. You will see in the menu on the left the FxCop report as well as reports from other tools that are executed after a build. Regards, Alex Vilela On 20 November 2012 14:02, Rob Richardson <[email protected]> wrote: > Thank you for your reply. > > If I want to learn to drive a car, a document that only lists the > car's parts and the functions each part performs is not going to be > very helpful to me. I could read through the document, and two thirds > of the way down I come to the entry for "steering wheel", and then I > learn that a steering wheel is what controls the direction the car is > going to go. In a separate section, I happen across the term > "accelerator", and I learn how to speed up. In a third place, I find > the term "brake", and I learn how to slow down. Then I find the term > "transmission" someplace else, and I am completely mystified. It's > possible to learn from such a document, but it's very difficult. > > A book designed to teach an unobservant 15-year-old how to drive a car > will begin by explaining the concepts of how a car works. It will > explain a bit about how a car works, how an engine burns gasoline, how > a transmission connects the engine to the drive shaft, how brakes stop > the car, and so on. All in very simple terms. Then it will begin to > describe the tasks the driver needs to perform: how to start the car, > how to shift into Drive, how to start rolling (carefully), how to > stop. Enough information to give the new driver the ability to move > gently around an empty parking lot. Then the book will add > information about the rules of the road, and how to safely drive when > there are other cars on the road. Only after all of this information > has been presented would the book present a list of every single part > of the car, what its function is, and why the driver might want to use > it. > > That is how a user's manual should be written: a high-level overview > of the concepts, a discussion of the steps needed to accomplish simple > tasks, followed by an expanded discussion of available steps that a > user might or might not want. Clear examples are provided for > performing simple tasks, and as the concepts are expanded, the > examples are expanded or new ones are introduced. Only then would an > exhaustive list of all available choices be presented. By then, the > reader hopefully knows enough to be able to use the reference section > to expand on the basic knowledge the earlier sections have given him. > > My question "What do I do after a build failure" was prompted by the > fact that the only choice I could clearly understand was to send an > E-mail message. Beyond that, I was drowning in information. (NOTE: > The following questions are rhetorical, at least until I read through > the wiki again.) How do I use a Merge task? What gets merged? How > is the output formatted? Where is it stored? Why do I have to use an > XML Log Publisher? How do I use the dashboard? (NOTE: That last > question is NOT rhetorical. I have not been able to get the dashboard > to work, I don't know how the dashboard should work, I don't know how > to tell if installation of the dashboard succeeded, and I don't even > know the URL I am supposed to use to get the dashboard to work.) What > other choices are there besides sending E-mail messages for notifying > users of build results? > > RobR >
