Steve Hebert's Development Blog

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Changing course on NAnt

I've been blogging about using NAnt in my spare time to get software builds fully automated at work. I ran into a product today that changed my approach.

Today I ran into Mike Gunderloy's posting that Visual Build Professional 5.6 is available and downloaded it. The package comes with 50-free uses as a trial period. I'm hooked. I have done more in 2 hours with Visual Build than I've been able to accomplish in 15 hours using NAnt. In the 2 hour time frame, I created a build that (1) downloads my source tree, (2) updates my project and installation build numbers (checkout/update/checkin), (3) builds the projects and (4) creates an installer package. Now for some minor cleanup to put this into production.

I'll pull my database script builder into Visual Build so I can have this entire process under one 'roof'.

The product is impressive so far and upon first glance it appears that the generated build file is very similar to NAnt's. I'll have to do more digging on this front.

How do I summarize the Visual Build tool so far? I think Visual Build is to NAnt as (pre-.net) InstallBuilder is to InstallShield. The more I dig into the product, the more flexible I find it to be and well thought out, too. I'll blog more as I go, but for now I've done a complete turn on my approach to the problem.

Published Dec 07 2004, 05:05 PM by shebert

Filed under: Build Automation

Comments

ben said:

geez, I would hope its a lot better than NAnt, for the $295 that it costs.....

# December 7, 2004 2:02 PM

Steve Hebert said:

I'm sure its not "better" than NAnt. The flexibility that NAnt has to offer is phenomonal. However, if I can nail out this build in a fraction of the time with the help of a $300 tool, I'll certainly do it.

Right now I perceive Visual Build Professional as being flexible enough for my use - that the UI doesn't hinder the product's build creation abilities too far. I think the InstallBuilder vs. InstallShield comparison is a useful analogy, there was a time I believed "real" installs were created with InstallShield and Wise' tool was primarily a toy. I found I was so wrong in my perception that I haven't looked seriously at an InstallShield product since. That said, InstallShield is an excellent product - more open-ended and flexible that InstallBuilder but I've never found a case where I wasn't able to perform the task at hand with InstallBuilder. And this includes situations where we install plug-ins for other products on the target machine as well as device drivers from 3rd parties.

Perhaps I'm giving too much credence to a product I've only worked with a short amount of time. But what I've seen so far is compelling over the NAnt-only appproach I was taking before. I'll blog more as I use it and I'll certainly retract this if I find that Visual Build doesn't live up to my needs.

I'll definitely make use of the 50 free uses to make sure I can build the product and put it into production before paying for it. :)

# December 8, 2004 3:16 AM

Darrell said:

$300 is 3-4 hours of billable time, depending on your rate. So unless you can do in NAnt in 3-4 hours what VisualBuild can do instantly, the payback is there (assuming you have the money, read on).

NAnt is valuable when you have no funding, and the choice is between NAnt (free) or no automated build at all.

# December 8, 2004 4:01 AM