Our automated build process is complete (I've been blogging about the process over the past several weeks). I thought I'd take a minute to blog a few of the bits I learned along the way. For a short history, I started the build process with NAnt to create our database script build and came across the Visual Build Professional tool in time to complete the MSI creation. Now for the tidbits I learned:
- NAnt is a truely flexible and powerful piece of software.
- NAnt's learning curve is non-trivial, and the further you dig the bigger it gets.
- NAnt's documentation set is somewhat disjointed. The associated wiki is marginally helpful and most useful information comes from googling the user community.
- Visual Build allowed me to create the entire build of the MSI project in less than 8 hours. This included time just learning how to navigate their product to putting it into production.
- Visual Build does not allow running a C# or VB.NET script as can be done in NAnt. It only allows for classic VB script, Javascript or Perl Script.
- I ended up leaving my database build script running under NAnt due to item #5 and NAnt is free after all. I just call my NAnt script from Visual Build.
So there it is, there are some more distribution features I'd like to incorporate but these features are not specific to the build automation tool.
-Steve