metahack

I use DocProject for automated documentation builds of one of the projects I'm currently involved in. DP takes away much of the manual doc-generation tasks as it provides a VS (Visual Studio) project for the documentation project and is integrated in the project's solution. This allowed me to incorporate the documentation build as part of project build (using msbuild), which is already integrated in my Hudson deployment

The doc build is not as seamless as it should be and I'll be highlighting the additional tasks required to build the doc project so you don't spend half of your day working out the build failures for the last few hours like I did :)

Environment Variables

Before you push your changes, make sure you add the environment variables DocProjectBuildPath and DocProjectPath in your project's configuration in Hudson. The value of these two variables can be found in Window's System Properties. It's strange that this wasn't already in the doc project's documentation. Without these two variables, msbuild will look for the target files in your C:\.

Leading dot (.) 

I started Hudson with a default configuration - with HUDSON_HOME pointing to ~/.hudson. That shouldn't be a problem but one of the build steps (there are 12 steps!) to build the doc project involved generating a .chm file for Help 1.x. Who would've thought that you're not allowed to have dots (.) in front of your folders? Moving my HUDSON_HOME to something more sane fixed it for me.