Three things you'd rather change in your build system today..

Yes..I am assuming that at least there are three things that you hate about your current build system (I can name a few tens for the build system that we use..one of them being that it is too complicated for a 'touchy' 'feely' Program Manager like me...- BTW I have borrowed this description of PM from Neil Enns (Lead Program Manager in the MSBuild team)!!)...

As we are gearing towards locking down our V1 more and more ..we are looking to plan and make our products better come Orcas..and that is where I am coming from. Sure..we do our usual stuff of talking to our very own build lab engineers for the SQLs and Offices and Dev Divs of the Microsoft world to gather some ideas, but I guess it just makes us so so MS centric and definitely thats not how the world operates always. In doing so we sometimes miss out on the other "non MS"scenarios of huge build labs, mini build labs and builds for the individual contributors right from their desktop. This is something that worries me often..especially since we are in the Dev Tools business and we have some a huge number of Devs and Tests, most of them incredibly smart (rest convinced that they are incredibly smart)..we are so prone to taking it for granted that we know the users of our products very well. At times it turns out to be a blessing and an awesome situation to be in..but sometimes I feel it is too limiting....

...so lets hear from you...My previous blogs asked for feedback around Team Build ..but here I dont want you to be limited by the 'it doesnt have' list of TB ..but to look outside of TB and inside what you folks are doing currently and what you find extremely painful and hoped and wished some tool would make easier ..I would love to hear from people handling huge build labs, mini build labs and also Individual contributors who do desktop builds or simply anyone on this..

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 17, 2006
  I don't like the following
  
  1) Cement takes too long to dry
  2) You need to dig a foundation first and then construct
  3) Its not easy to rebuild.
• Anonymous
  January 17, 2006
  Thanks for the insightful comments Abhinab. Will make sure all these inputs are specd out clearly in the next 'building' product..and I will make sure you are the dev "implementing" it ;)
• Anonymous
  January 18, 2006
  We use CC.Net.
  
  1. I would love to be able to build a specific version on demand.
  
  2. I want to be able to set the assembly version in a better programmatic way than what we do currently which is using a search and replace.
  
  3. I want better integration with building deployment packages easily. We are looking at integrating with Wix, but I suffer from a lack of time. I'd love if I could easily take my project and easily integrate it into a MSI file or for a maint release an MSP. Though, I'm not sure how this becomes "easy."
  
  Bonus 4. I would love a best practices that doesn't talk about abstract ideas, and instead says, do it this way with a simple example. I wrote a custom NAnt task to integrate our sql patches into our system. It works and is based on the current version of the application, but I want to know if there is a better tried and true way to do this.