I've recently started thinking about the need of our own CIS, and FinalBuilder came into my mind because I was still using it and had just renewed assurance.
Created a virtual machine for this, installed my FB on it, then installed FB server.
Issue 1: FB Server told me that I would need IIS. Good to inform me, easy to install.
Issue 2: FB Server didn't tell me that I would manually need to add ASP.NET when installing IIS. Took my some search on the Internet to find out about this. Ugly.
Issue 3: As someone not knowing IIS, I had to continue with guessing. I could only access the IIS server from the virtual machine. Finding out that I had to enable a firewall rule for IIS first took even more time.
Issue 4: tried to upload a project file. Error: Maximum request length exceeded. Sure, the file ds 8-9 MB - but it's a small project, if it is very usual to need to manually adjust IIS in that regard, why don't do it during installation/creation of the site, or recommend it in a documented way? I don't want to find out that I need to use a text editor to adjust IIS to work with standard FB files.
Issue 5: issue 4 only appeared because I thought I had to upload the .fbl7 file. Why don't hint at the fact that the .fbz7 file needs to be uploaded on the upload page?
If you depend on third party software, I would strongly recommend some kind of tutorial / first steps / readme!
To compare, I installed Jenkins, the open source solution - not even 15 minutes and I was able to make my first build! I really like FB
Sorry, pressed Send before my final sentence was written. Anyway, it continues from there.
I really like FB, but hey you’re asking for quite some money for the Professional version that includes the server. It would have cost the guys who deal with this on a daily bane half an hour to compile an easy “mind these manual steps” tutorial, while half a day of my working time that was spend because the setup was far from the term “professional” probably cost me more than the license.
Unfortunately automating IIS/ASP.NET installs is very much a hit and miss affair. The FinalBuilder Server Installer does attempt to detect if ASP.NET is installed on IIS, unfortunately this is unreliable, IIS reports it’s installed when it isn’t, and when we run the install task during the install it sometimes reports success but didn’t actually do anything. Such is life with IIS/ASP.NET. The issues you are reporting are IIS configuration issues… we do try to work around these when possible… it’s not uncommon for things to change with windows update (as happened recently).
I will look into the max request length issue, we may be able to adjust that in the installer. As for uploading the project files, I guess we too for granted that users would know what files are FinalBuilder Project Files. I’ll see if we can’t add a filemask to the browse dialog (no idea if thats possible in the browser).
Installing Jenkins is simple because it depends only on Java, it doesn’t use IIS. If .NET had such an option believe me we would be using it. IIS is painful to work with. Comparing Jenkins and FB Server is like comparing apples and oranges, they are very different things (Jenkins does not include FinalBuilder). With FinalBuilder Server you are really paying for FinalBuilder.