What Tools Do You Recommend To Auto-Build Your Application? [closed]

Answer 1

We just migrated from a hand-rolled set of Perl scripts to a Buildbot setup. I found it because that's what Google's using for Chrome.

You can do nightlies, or it can integrate with source control to do an isolated test build whenever anybody does a checkin, or a variety of other things. It's also parallel; you can have more than one machine in the build farm, either for specialized duties or just to handle more load.

The entire system is written in Python, so it's platform-agnostic, which is important if you need to do builds on more than one platform. It can do anything you can do from the command line; we have it calling MSBuild for user-mode components, a DDK build for kernel-mode pieces, and running products for unit test builds.

Out of the box it supports most OSS source control tools, but if you're using TFS or something else you may need to modify the package that you install on the slave machines.

Answer 2

We use CruiseControl.NET and UppercuT (which uses NAnt) to do this. UppercuT uses conventions for building so it makes it really easy for someone to get started by answering three questions (What is the solution named? What is the path to source control? What is your company's name?) and you are building.

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

Some good explanations here: UppercuT

Answer 3

I'm currently using CruiseControl integrated with Ant to control project builds. This allows flexibility of build schedules and means you can automate the entire build process fairly easily using Ant scripts. Also, during defect fixing periods you can have CruiseControl set up to watch for source control submissions instead of time periods and build when these occur. This allows developers very quick feedback on defect fixes.