Thibaut Barrère / LoGeek

I've just started blogging about it and will likely blog more about it in the next few weeks: Rake gives you a tremendous power when it comes to automating tasks for any kind of applications, including DotNet applications. For those DotNet applications, I only delegate the compilation step to MsBuild. All the rest is handled through Rake itself, which may do the job itself and/or delegates stuff to other binaries (things like wget, winscp, unzip, gunzip, putty).

I usually setup a CruiseControl.Net instance when I start a DotNet project. When I started using Rake, I wanted to be able to call Rake from CruiseControl.Net.

Here's an extract of a working ccnet.config file calling Rake. You'll notice that the paths are absolute to ensure it doesn't rely on a PATH variable, which cause troubles when CCNet is running as a service.

You can call as many Rake tasks as you like on the same row. Properties (key=value) can be passed along, and retrieved later in the Rakefile using ENV['key'].