Build Practices
Great article on build practices with .NET. It outlines the problems but doesn't really offer code to solve any of them! Article
Also an interesting utility for automating builds that I plan to check out: FinalBuilder. Another interesting tool: Visual Build. A reader wrote about another great build tool Autonomy that integrates with NAnt.
At my current project we wrote our own automated build facility that does our nightly builds by:
- Parsing an XML file for projects to include
- Gets the current projects out of SourceSafe
- Updates all the AssemblyInfo.cs files with a new version number
- Walks the dependencies in the .csproj files to determine a build order
- Builds the source
- Emails the result to a build manager
- Starts smoke test if the build was successfull.
This whole process is very specialized for our environment but I think it is stuff that any development team should be doing. The question is why hasn't Microsoft filled this gap with tools for teams to do this type of thing? For that matter why do we still have the crappy Source Safe shipping as part of VS.NET? It is an embarrassment but until Microsoft drops it from the package it is going to be what most teams are forced to use since it is "free".
I know a ton of you will write me and say, "Why not use CVS?". Great question. I consider myself fairly technical. I tried to setup CVSNT and spent three days searching the web, etc just trying to get the service up! This doesn't include getting a front end application working or trying to understand how to use it! We need something with the usability of Source Safe in both daily use and setup that has a much more robust store mechanism and uses TCPIP for communication with the central server in an efficient fashion.
1:55:47 PM 
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