Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Build scripts

I will be honest; I am pretty much a rookie at build scripts. I know some guys out there have weird and wonderful super complex complex NAnt, MSbuild, *ake files that do everything in including there dirty washing.
Well over the last year I have usually had a build script lying around that was kinda "just there", more for assurance that what i was doing could be easily hooked in to a CI scenario. However I have been using the build script local over VS lately and am finding it pretty good. It certainly is a lot faster just to build the soln. I can also :

  • control what gets built

  • what tests are run

  • what code analysis gets done

  • if i need a distribution zip etc

all by clicking on a different bat file.
All of my tasks are in my NAnt file and each bat file just points to a different task.
I have a quick build (no test or code analysis), a standard build (build, run all unit tests and code analysis) and a deploy (standard plus zip the required files for a deploy).
Any solution bigger than a scratch pad can really benefit form a build script. The best thing is, if you are like me and many of your solutions have the same general structure, once you are happy with your defaults then you just need to change one or two parameters in the script for your different solutions.
If you are not using a local build script i would highly recommend it. I am just disappointed I have not been using it more in the past.

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