CI/CD Scaling for Multiple Projects

While building the Jenkinsfile.groovy for a single project is straightforward, we want to share the logic across multiple C# projects.

I won’t go into the details as I did with my other posts about the process I went through. I moved the logic for Jenkinsfile.groovy into a Jenkins shared library, which is publicly available at Jenkins Library Sample.

Continue reading

CI/CD Log Processing

I was delighted to integrate the static analysis, but at the time of writing, I didn’t have the means to process the output. However, I have found a tool to process it.

The Jenkins plugin “Warnings Next Generation” supports processing the sarif file and can process the entire log. Furthermore, it provides functionality to gather the results that we can include in our Slack messages.

Continue reading

CI/CD Extending Slack Support

As I continue to extend functionality for the jenkins-project-sample-dotnet, I’m wandering into areas I haven’t explored before. I have refined previous posts to simplify steps based on what I learned; however, revising what I did before won’t scale.

In the case of Slack notifications, the previous post is fine for simple posts, but I wanted to do something a little extra. I want to post a Slack message to a channel and post follow-up messages with additional information.

I need to use a Slack bot user instead of the Jenkins CI integration to achieve this.

Continue reading

CI/CD Slack Notifications

You may not currently be using Slack for communication. Still, it is worth considering if you are working in a group (even for school projects) and aren’t using an alternative (beyond email). You can set up a Slack workspace for free and configure it for notifications.

I have a workspace set up for myself that I use with my family for sending lots of random stuff, but I also use it to test integrations I can then apply elsewhere.

Continue reading

CI/CD Static Security Scanning

The following is inspired by the article from Kris the Coding Unicorn. This is not meant to be a comprehensive suite of tests but a start.

The following steps use the open-source Security Code Scan project, which publishes a tool to NuGet.

Unfortunately, Jenkins doesn’t seem to have a mechanism for visualizing security scans, so the output file is stored as an artifact of the job.

Continue reading

CI/CD Code Coverage

Code coverage measures how much of the code is covered when running tests. This is a useful indicator of how effective tests are. One of the features we want to add is to set a minimum bar for testing to increase the quality of our components.

Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition doesn’t automatically include code coverage features out of the box. There are some things we can do to expose it in Jenkins during our build processes, validate the results, and possibly fail the build based on it. Within Visual Studio itself, you can install Fine Code Coverage from the Visual Studio Marketplace or consider tools such as NCrunch.

Adding additional steps to Jenkins won’t take long to get code coverage data and expose it on the Jenkins build page.

Continue reading

CI/CD Revisions!

I have been relying on my previous efforts over five years ago that initially set out our C# builds in Jenkins. However, my next topic, code coverage, was new territory for me.

In the process of working through code coverage, I had the opportunity to discover opportunities to clean up the existing build scripts set out in the previous articles so far.

This article will cover the revisions I’ve made. However, I’ll also update the previous articles that will jump immediately to the result.

Continue reading

CI/CD Publishing NuGet Packages

Initially, when building C# projects, I would have multiple solutions directly referencing the projects to be built. Sometimes, the solutions would have an extraordinary number of projects in them, so I could update them all in parallel.

However, this isn’t an ideal scenario as it makes it easy to blend code and develop tighter dependencies between modules that make future software development harder. By decomposing projects into smaller, more discrete and manageable components, we can increase the rigour around changes we make and have greater confidence in the code quality.

The use of NuGet to store versions of my packages means the applications I build can be small and lean and can work with already-defined mechanisms for publishing and retrieving packages.

I don’t want to publish my personal NuGet packages to a public repository (at least not without developing some confidence in the process first). So I have set up a Sonatype Nexus Repository to host NuGet packages.

I’ll go through the steps for configuring the Nexus Repository, Jenkins, and Visual Studio projects.

Continue reading