Review: Visual Build Professional

Visual Build Professional 6.0, $295
Kinook Software
Colorado Springs, Colorado
(719) 481-4128 
http://www.visualbuild.com/

Visual Build Professional is a serious GUI-based build-automation tool. That is, it's a tool for automating all the steps that go into building and deploying software, from getting the latest versions of files from your source code repository right through burning the CD or sending the results off via FTP. And you set things up by a process of dragging icons and filling in dialog boxes (as opposed to writing XML files, as tools like NAnt would have you do). With the release of version 6.0, VBP has added support for more individual tools than ever before, as well as some additional flexibility to design builds the way you want them.

On the tool side, you will find support for dozens of the most popular tools here. These include compilers (Visual Studio, VB6, Delphi, JBuilder, and more), Installers (InstallShield, Wise, InstallAnywhere, NSIS, and more),. version control tools (CVS, Clearcase, SVN, VSS, Vault, Perforce, and more), TDD tools including NDoc and NUnit, and various other odds and ends such as Help and Manual. Each of these is represented by a single step in the build process, and each step gets its own tabbed dialog box with a wealth of options. For example, the Make VS.NET step lets you choose the Visual Studio solution to build, increment the versions of the built file, set project properties, pass through values to MSBUILD, and so on. New actions in version 6 include full support for Visual Studio Team System, ClearCase, InstallAnywhere.NET, MSBUILD, posting to newsgroups, calling NAnt and Ant scripts, and more.

In addition to the tool-specific steps there are a whole bunch of steps here to perform the sort of utility operations that have to be done to produce software. These encompass things like moving and copying files, signing code, running XML transforms on log files, sending mail, setting up IIS virtual directories, running SQL, managing services, and so on. There's a general-purpose Run Program action available for anything that's not a part of the default set of VBP actions, so you can hook in whatever custom build steps your software requires.

VBP is exceptionally strong in script flexibility, both on the authoring side and when you're running your build scripts. It's easy to break scripts down into subroutines, which is nice for both maintenance and reusability. There are also explicit branches in case of failure, and if a script fails, you can fix things and then start rebuilding from the point of failure. When you're running a build, you can build a single step or a group of steps, step through one action at a time, and set breakpoints - this makes testing changes to your builds much easier than it is in XML-based products. And of course if you're the sort of person who would rather have a GUI to view properties than a lot of angle brackets, VBP is well ahead of things like NAnt. There are a whole bunch of sample files in the box to get you started on writing scripts and to show off some of the more advanced facilities here.

There's a 30-day trial download available if you'd like to see how well VBP fits in with your own build processes.

  Click for larger screenshot

Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.

Published October 25, 2005