Followup…

I have figured out a workaround to the problem regarding CruiseControl.NET having to run in Console-mode… There obviously wasn’t any elegant way to handle this so I decided to at least try and hide the console window outputting CruiseControl debugging info. so you can hide a console window and keep the process running. Instead of firing up CruiseControl.NET directly I created a small consoleapp which fires up CruiseControl.NET in console mode and then uses Windows API to hide the console window from the screen and was pretty amazed that I pulled it off within an hour. So I ended up with this - all credits to Brendan Grant:

class Program

{
    [DllImport("user32.dll")]
    public static extern IntPtr FindWindow(string lpClassName, string lpWindowName);

    [DllImport("user32.dll")]
    static extern bool ShowWindow(IntPtr hWnd, int nCmdShow);

    
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        var fi = new FileInfo(string.Format("{0}/CruiseControl.NET/server/ccnet.exe", Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("PROGRAMFILES")));
        if (!File.Exists(fi.FullName))
        {
            Console.WriteLine("ccnet.exe not found in " + fi.FullName);
            Console.Read();
            Environment.Exit(0);
        }           

        var p = new Process {StartInfo = new ProcessStartInfo(fi.FullName)};
        p.StartInfo.WorkingDirectory = fi.DirectoryName;
        p.Start();
        Thread.Sleep(3000);

        SetConsoleWindowVisibility(false, fi.FullName);
    }

    public static void SetConsoleWindowVisibility(bool visible, string title)
    {
        // below is Brandon's code           
        //Sometimes System.Windows.Forms.Application.ExecutablePath works for the caption depending on the system you are running under.          
        var hWnd = FindWindow(null, title);

        if (hWnd != IntPtr.Zero)
        {
            if (!visible)
                //Hide the window                   
                ShowWindow(hWnd, 0); // 0 = SW_HIDE               
            else
                //Show window again                   
                ShowWindow(hWnd, 1); //1 = SW_SHOWNORMA          
        }
    }
}

Now I’m exactly where I was a few days ago except I don’t have a console window on my server… I still have to remember not to log off when remoting to my buildserver and if something crashes I haven’t got any context running CruiseControl which writes stuff into the Eventlog etc. At best this is – well, pretty bad coding style actually... but again: It’ll do for now  :o)