Changing course on NAnt
I've been blogging about using NAnt in my spare time to get software builds fully automated at work. I ran into a product today that changed my approach.
Today I ran into Mike Gunderloy's posting that Visual Build Professional 5.6 is available and downloaded it. The package comes with 50-free uses as a trial period. I'm hooked. I have done more in 2 hours with Visual Build than I've been able to accomplish in 15 hours using NAnt. In the 2 hour time frame, I created a build that (1) downloads my source tree, (2) updates my project and installation build numbers (checkout/update/checkin), (3) builds the projects and (4) creates an installer package. Now for some minor cleanup to put this into production.
I'll pull my database script builder into Visual Build so I can have this entire process under one 'roof'.
The product is impressive so far and upon first glance it appears that the generated build file is very similar to NAnt's. I'll have to do more digging on this front.
How do I summarize the Visual Build tool so far? I think Visual Build is to NAnt as (pre-.net) InstallBuilder is to InstallShield. The more I dig into the product, the more flexible I find it to be and well thought out, too. I'll blog more as I go, but for now I've done a complete turn on my approach to the problem.