Continuous Integration best practice

[benfulton]

My instinct for setting up a CI build on a Windows machine was to set up a task in the task scheduler to run every x minutes.

But I see the Continuous Integration sample that is available in the samples, which seems to start and then go continually all day with a Sleep step in the middle. Is there a specific reason why this technique is superior to the task scheduler?

[kinook]

Both methods have different advantages and drawbacks. Some are listed below.

Continously repeating build loop

+ automatic serialization of builds
- depending on requirements, may need to configure build box to automatically logon and run scheduled task at login (see notes at http://www.visualbuild.com/Manual/contintegsample.htm for details)

Repeating scheduled task

+ runs whether user is logged on or not (but no visible UI if not)
- need to ensure builds are run sequentially (one way is to check for signal file at start of build and exit if found, then create a signal file and delete on build succeed/fail)