What build tool do you use professionally?

Question

At home, I use CTRL+SHIFT+B or F7 or whatever key sequence initiates the build for my build tool. At work, this doesn't quite cut it.

At my first job (an internship) we used a product called Visual Build, which I have come to like very much. It's the best build tool I've ever worked with. The down side here is that it's not free.

At my latest job, I came in knowing literally nothing about Ant. Now, unfortunately, I've become deeply involved in our build processes, and cannot extricate myself. It works, yes, but after coming from Visual build, it seems like it's fighting me every step of the way. Yes, it's free, but we're not trying to be a free-software-only development company or anything.

I've never looked in to make or any other build tools, so I don't really know what else is out there.

Has anybody ever seen or had experience with Visual Build? Mostly I'm fond of a few key things:

1. it has a GUI
2. it runs arbitrary VBScript without the need of a compiled class
3. you can step through the build process, or start from anywhere in the middle.

Are there any free build tools that have this? Is there any way to convince people that it's worth it to move on? It's 2008. We use IDEs to develop, why not (IBEs) to build?

Edit: I'm mostly looking for an answer to my last questions; Is there a solution with a built-in GUI that I can use for free?

Answer 1

I am not sure this is exactly what you are looking for, but I LOVE CruiseControl.NET. I have it build my projects using the MSBuild task. It doesn't have a GUI exactly, but there is a web interface to view the results of your builds and a System Tray resident program which will alert you of the build status.

Answer 2

Not very sophisticated, but we use a set of batch files. And that works great.

Answer 3

For Java projects we use Teamcity, sort of cruise control like, but you can also do a remote run, i.e. you send your changes to the server, it builds and does unit tests, if everything works ok, THEN you checkin, very nice build tool and free for up to 20 build configurations.

For our Visual Studio 2005 projects including packaging the final exes and dlls with InstallShield and putting them up on a shared server we use Final Builder, it's not free, but it is very easy to use and get started with.

We also telnet out (from FinalBuilder) to a number of other platforms (Unix/Linux/OpenVMS) and start remote builds by running makefiles there.

We do not use continous build, but there is a FinalBuilder Server which handles that and comes free with the FinalBuilder Professional license.

We are very happy with FinalBuilder, it's quite easy to get up to speed with and powerful enough to solve most problems.

Answer 4

CMake. Generates build file for KDevelop, Eclipse, Makefiles and Visual Studio (and XCode), and it really works. You can easily extend it with macros, although the programming capabilities are rather limited. It's easy to learn, and porting an existing application from Visual Studio to it is pretty easy. However, you are limited to C++/C and IIRC Fortran code.

KDE is also using CMake now, so it seems to scale very well (i.e. generation time for the projects/dependency checking is not too bad).

Answer 5

Going back to the keystrokes thing for a sec, I found Hoekey which the CTO loves. I don't use it myself, but as a way of assign keystrokes to things, it's pretty good.

Answer 6

I know nothing of Visual Build, but from your description it sounds like it is tied to Windows and doesn't run from the command line.

If you are building Java software (I assume you are since you are using Ant), it's preferable to have a cross-platform tool. If you can run the tool from the command-line, then it is scriptable which is extremely important for automation.

Ant is also extensible and a de facto standard. Many tools that you may use (Cobertura, TestNG, etc.) provide Ant tasks so that they can easily be intergrated with your build.

I use Ant for all Java projects. Some people prefer Maven, but I'm not one of them. Ant is far from perfect (the XML syntax is a bit clunky) but it is well documented, extremely stable and pretty straightforward.

If you use a standard tool, such as Ant or Maven, you will be able to take advantage of any number of Continuous Integration products. I doubt you will find many that work with Visual Build.

Most IDEs support Ant, so they give you a GUI of sorts and your CI server will give you a web interface for doing builds.

Answer 7

NAnt (.NET port of Ant). Works great and is easily extensible.

Answer 8

For small projects I do use post-build scripts and with the support of 7z, Nsis and similar CLI tools it's doing the job perfectly for me.

Answer 9

TeamCity and CuriseControl works well for any projects,but here is why you would like to choose TeamCity:-

Ease of setup: During setup we found TeamCity easier to setup and use especially compared to CruiseControl. We did not need to edit XML files or massively configure individual build machines like CruiseControl.

Ease of extensibility:TeamCity stands out in its ease of extensibility too. If we find that builds are waiting in the queue too long, we can add more computers as agents. The only additional work on our end is registering the new computers with the TeamCity server and installing msbuild and subversion.

Interaction with Subversion: One can check how many and what changes were committed to subversion since the last build, who started a build etc.

Answer 10

I've grown very fond of scons for building C++ files. It's very straightforward and the build scripts are written in Python (which is much better than some hacked together DSL IMO).

Answer 11

We use FinalBuilder - I think it's very similar to VisualBuild, though I've not used the latter.

It does run from the command line, and you can integrate it with CC.Net if you want.

Answer 12

Ant or Maven are great little build tools.

And if you want to automate the build process there are some great tools like TeamCity and Bamboo.

Answer 13

Personally I use Makefiles for pretty much everything because they are simple as hell. But in my work, I'm forced to use ant.

The main problem I have against ant is that XML makes it hard to read and understand, even with the correct indentation. On the other hand, the verbosity of XML can help when reading someone else's ant file, but still makes it a PITA when the file is more than a few tens of lines.

As for having a GUI to build... I've always felt that's a minus rather than a plus.

Answer 14

UppercuT. It's free.

UppercuT uses NAnt to build and it is the insanely easy to use Build Framework.

Automated Builds as easy as (1) solution name, (2) source control path, (3) company name for most projects!!!

http://code.google.com/p/uppercut/

Some good explanations here: UppercuT

Answer 15

Maven is the best for me because it handles the project dependencies