Lots of bug fixes, lots of changes to the Dashboard.

New plugins:

• Cincom Smalltalk VisualWorks Store Source Control
• Git Source Control & Bootstrapper
• Http Publisher
• Mercurial Source Control & Bootstrapper
• SVNLabelIncrementer

See detailed release notes here.

For those who haven't heard about it CITCON is the Continuous Integration and Testing CONference, an open spaces (or "unconference") event that attracts an energetic and enthusiastic crowd of CIT practitioners from around the US, Europe and Asia. If you've never been to an open spaces event you can think of it as the best part of a normal conference -- the hallway conversation -- dialed up to 11!

You can read about past CITCONs on the wiki and then register today. But hurry, there are already 120 people registered and only 30 more registrations will be accepted!

If you can't make it to Denver then you might want to plan ahead by registering now for CITCON Melbourne in June or CITCON Amsterdam in October. Or maybe even all three!

Now I could see it getting tricky if you have multiple build machines, but it seems like that would be pretty easy to handle as well by using different config files for different machines, or something similar. That might violate the DRY principle, so it would be good to think a little more about it. How do others deal with this?

Btw, if you're not familiar with the Open Space conference format you might want to read this description. If you're still not sure if this format or event is for you, you might want to see what people have posted about past CITCONs on the web, or read the feedback from Dallas earlier this year.

If you don't like what you see in the mirror, do you blame the mirror or do you start thinking about spending more time at the gym?

CITCON is different from a standard conference in a couple of ways:

• It is free, but scheduled for a Friday night and Saturday. This means the people who attend are the people who are passionate enough about the topic to give up some of their personal time, rather than those people who are able to have their companies pay for it.
• It is an open spaces event. So rather than going from talk to talk and hoping to hear something of interest the attendees build the agenda, with each topic an interactive discussion.

If you've ever attended a conference and left feeling that the best part of the conference was the hallway conversation, then you should understand the appeal of the CITCON format. (At least this is the appeal for me!)

Past CITCON events (Chicago & London) had a fantastic mix of people, including CI and testing tool makers, very experienced authors and consultants, new and experienced Agile practitioners. CITCON Dallas promises more of the same.

Hope to see you there.

The conference will be following the same Open Spaces (or unconference) format as the 2006 CITCON in Chicago and London. These prior CITCON drew enthusiastic practitioners at all levels of experience, all looking to share what they knew and to learn what they could. We're looking for more of the same in Dallas.

Please help spread the word about CITCON and we look forward to seeing you there!

Paul Julius
Jeffrey Fredrick

For those who aren't aware CITCON is the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, a free open spaces (or unconference) event on continuous integration and the testing that goes with it.

Given the open spaces format it is impossible to predict what the exact session topics will be but a sampling of the topics (and notes) from the CITCON Chicago event from earlier this year is available on the wiki. Also available are some photos, feedback, links to related blog entries and more... More than enough to be convinced that you should sign up today!

We are proud to announce that registration is now open for the next Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, CITCON London 2006 on October 6 & 7. Space is limited to the first 120 registrants and attendance is free. Registration is on-line.

The conference will be following the same Open Spaces (or unconference) format as the very successful Chicago edition back in April 2006. The Chicago CITCON drew an enthusiastic group of practitioners, all looking to share what they knew and to learn what they could.

We would appreciate your help in getting the word out. Please blog/post/email/chat about CITCON London 2006!

We hope to see as many of you there as can make it.

Sincerely,

Paul Julius
Jeffrey Fredrick
Chair-people, CITCON London 2006

• replace Xalan with Saxon. this should both increase the speed of the web application and reduce if not eliminate the dreaded OutOfMemoryErrors.
• use an Ant-style launcher instead of setting the classpath in the CC start script or in the manifest.

With these changes we know there will be issues to shake out so we're seeking alpha testers willing to have a go with the latest and greatest and give us feedback on the mailing list.

Are you up for it?

ps: As a side-effect of the switch to Saxon CC versions 2.6 and later will require JRE 1.4 or later (though you can still build projects under 1.3).

To get right to it, here is our basic Agitator / Tinderbox setup courtesy of our Product Manager, Nicole Pauls:

• Updated Xerces and Xalan jars to fix memory leak (CC-426)
• ProjectWrapper: Fix problem where forcing a build while build is running will effectively kill the worker thread leading to all projects queued but not building (CC-431). Patch by John Lewis.

Along with those bug fixes there are a few new plugins:

• ClearCaseBaselinePublisher: New publisher for use with ClearCase UCM (CC-414). Submitted by Kevin Lee.
• LDAPMapper: Email mapper that uses an LDAP lookup to determine user email addresses (CC-413). Submitted by Esa Laine.
• Maven2SnapshotDependency: New sourcecontrol (CC-438). Contributed by Dan Rollo with fixes by Jerome Lacoste.

So what are you waiting for? Go get it...

The main focus is fixtures but it also has some helpers for creating continuous integration scripts. This was all designed around subversion post-commit hooks and there is even a handler for you to run a SimpleXMLRPCServer.

So if you want to adopt developer testing as part of your standard practices make sure you're using Continuous Integration. In the beginning it is the "build successful" messages you'll be looking for, but for the long term you'll be hooked on those times the lamp goes red.