In “Am I Alone Here?”, Tim Goodwin has a nice blog commenting on his desire to run a single command build using only assets from the version control repository. I could not agree more. As Martin Fowler mentions in his Continuous Integration article “…anyone should be able to bring in a virgin machine, check the sources out of the repository, issue a single command, and have a running system on their machine.”

Tim points out some of the challenges he experienced while working in a Microsoft environment. It is imperative that vendors give us the capability to run everything from the command line with minimal effort. GUI tools are fine as long as you still have the capability to run the same from the command line or API. Wizards or other GUI tools provide a level of automation (the first time) but not when we need to repeat a series of activities. In particular, when we need to setup an automated Continuous Integration server.

I am fond of saying if you can’t run (a tool: server, program, etc.) from the command line, it doesn’t exist (as a tool).

P.S. When is Microsoft going to eliminate the Visual Studio dependency on MSTest? This means I must install an IDE on any machine I wish to build software when using MSTest…not an acceptable option to me.