Local Build Automation?

Question

Working in a team environment, we have a Team Foundation Server that also contains a Team Build component. It is configured to automatically build all projects and solutions at specific times or on request.

We develop a product that is built with several solultions that depend on eachother. When things have been changed in one solution, it has to be rebuilt locally manually in both debug and release mode so that changes take effect in another solution that depends on it.

Also when a developer retrieves all sources the first time, he has to build all solutions manually in the correct order to get a working environment.

What is the best way to automate things like this? Create .cmd files that trigger the correct msbuild files? Using a program such as CruiseControl.NET?

What do you people do to maintain a clean local development environment?

Answer 1

What I did for our Team was to provide a Visual Studio Solution which contains all projects. Then I created a simple .cmd file which uses the commmandline tools of Visual Studio to build this solution with their respective debug/release/profile configurations. This is a one step build solution that can be used from every engineering machine.

The next level is the continuous integration system that is setup to check for changes every 15 min and start a build if there are changes in the VCS. I'm using hudson as our CI system. The CI system is used to build the native projects, the java projects as well as the flex stuff. Since everything can be build from the commandline it's pretty easy to use it with hudson or CruiseControl.NET.