VSoft Technologies Blogs

Team Foundation Build and FinalBuilder

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:00:00 GMT

The Accentient Blog provided an interesting post recently comparing Team Foundation Build and FinalBuilder. It was great to see them offer an unbiased insight in to the distinctive advantages of each of these tools and it's worth a read if you're using or planning to use one or both.

We've had plenty to say over the years about the relationship between FinalBuilder and TFS/MSBuild/Team Foundation Build. Naturally, we have a slight bias toward one of the tools, but if you're interested in learning more about combining the two, check out:

how to integrate FinalBuilder with TFS;
why you would use FinalBuilder when you already have Team System;
why FinalBuilder and Team Foundation Build are a match made in heaven;
a comparison between the MSBuild community's wish list and the feature set of FinalBuilder; and
the benefits of using both FinalBuilder and TFS.

Finally, I must disagree with just one of Accentient's statments. The final line read:

As Team Foundation Build matures, it will likely provide a feature parity competitor to FinalBuilder, but it has some catching up to do.

As Team Foundation Build matures, it may begin to provide feature parity with FinalBuilder 5 or even 6. However, by then we'll be on to FB 7 or FB 8 and we have every intention of making sure these future versions will offer unique and useful features. Team Foundation Build will always have some catching up to do with FinalBuilder.

Hate Team Foundation Server?

Thu, 15 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

According to Google Analytics statistics for the past month, a number of people found the FinalBuilder web site in Google search results for the query hate "Team Foundation Server"

I didn't know so many people felt that way!

(For the record, we think that FinalBuilder complements Team Foundation Build in very productive ways.)

Team Foundation Build and FinalBuilder 6 (a match made in heaven)

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 05:00:00 GMT

I just posted a new article on Integrating FinalBuilder with Microsoft Team Foundation Server. The article deals with the great new Team Build integration in FinalBuilder 6.

You can now do things with FinalBuilder 6 and Team Build which are impossible to achieve with any other tool combination, and you can do it all without editing any MSBuild files at all.

Need MbUnit test statistics in your Team Build Quality Report? Do it with FinalBuilder.

Need to deploy build results via FTP? Do it with FinalBuilder.

Need to build legacy Visual Studio 2003/Delphi/C++ Builder/VB 6 projects with Team Build, and see compiler metrics in the Team Build Report? Do it with FinalBuilder.

Need smart version information management (including auto-incrementing version numbers across projects) without having to use custom C# code? Do it with FinalBuilder.

Need to do perform any of the thousands of other built-in operations, with full graphical configuration and structured logging output? Do it with FinalBuilder.

If you're interested, check out the new article here.

I also wanted to plug a great (FREE) Screencast creator called Wink, by DebugMode Software. Paul put me onto this and I used it to create the Flash videos in the article. We also have a license to an expensive commercial product, but I don't think I'll ever want to use it again now that I've found Wink.

"I have Microsoft Team System, why do I need FinalBuilder?"

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 14:19:44 GMT

I'm writing this entry from a delegate work area at TechEd Barcelona. We've been talking to a lot of people over the past two days about FinalBuilder.

Many people have said "Oh, we have Team System. We already have automated builds." The surprising thing is how many people don't realise what they're missing out on, or that FinalBuilder can integrate directly with Team System.

With Team System you can do this in your build:

Get a fresh copy of your project's source
Build one or more Visual Studio 2005 solutions
Run Visual Studio tests & Visual Studio code coverage analysis
Deploy built applications to a network share

... that's about it.

Not that this is a bad thing - sometimes all you need to do is to build a solution, and you're done. It's still an automated build, and it's a world better than F5 as a build process.

However, with FinalBuilder you can easily extend Team Build to:

Change the build process without editing XML
Automatically update and increment version information
Build solutions with any version of Visual Studio or MSBuild
Create, edit or remove Work Items based on build outcomes
Deploy to multiple locations, or via FTP
Build third party projects
Build installers
Run tests using different test frameworks
Build multiple versions or editions of the same product
Build legacy code (possibly using different tools)
Retrieve source code from legacy source repositories
Generate structured build logs, with the ability to instantly jump to any points of failure.

FinalBuilder slots directly into Team Build as a build engine, in place of (or beside) MSBuild.

At TechEd, many people have recognised that they face one or more of these scenarios. A few have no other build requirements, but a lot of people have said "Oh, we've been doing that manually" or "Yes, we've been doing this with MSBuild but it's hard and it keeps breaking."

These are the cases where FinalBuilder can help create a true end-to-end build and release system, one which saves time and money and helps safeguard build quality and avoid last-minute surprises.

... and no more XML files!

Mixing up FinalBuilder with Team System (no more XML files!)

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 14:00:00 GMT

One of the comments that we frequently hear from users is "I couldn't do xyz with MSBuild, but I can now with FinalBuilder."

This is great, but hardly surprising. FinalBuilder includes out-of-the-box support for many more tools and processes than MSBuild. Not to mention that it has a GUI to set up your build process - no more editing XML files!

Lately, though, an increasing number of our users are moving to Microsoft Team System. One of the cornerstones of the Team System process is the Team Foundation Build engine, which is built on top of MSBuild.

Now, the Team Foundation Build wizard is fine if you only need to create simple build processes. Get some files, build some solutions, deploy some binaries to a file share. If you need to do anything more, though (and who doesn't?), then you're stuck back in XML land... The same applies if you want to edit your build processes after you've created them.

Plain XML editing, with no built-in support for third-party tools, no support for data processing, no support for parallelisation, FTP transfers, Active Scripting, structured exceptions, recursion or Windows system functionality...

FinalBuilder to the rescue!

The Team Foundation Build engine allows you to add custom MSBuild tasks at any stage of your build process. This means that, with just a couple of lines of XML, you can move your entire Team Build process to FinalBuilder! FinalBuilder can be used in place of MSBuild to provide functionality at every stage of the Team Foundation build process (fetch, compile, test & deploy.) What's more, it all fits perfectly within the Team System framework!

To see how, take a look at the walkthrough I just wrote: Integrating FinalBuilder with Microsoft Team Foundation Build.

... Happy building!