Automating a Build System

At work I've been experimenting with Visual Build Pro which is commercial Build System software. Our existing build system is well let's say very backwardly compatible ... as far back as Dos so a new Version Control System and new Build System are both welcome.

The Build System software I've been looking at is Visual Build Pro (VBP) by Kinook Software and it's very nice and at $295, very reasonably priced. I got up to speed with it very quickly and it's clear that the designers have probably used it on their own projects as everything is well thought out. Integration with the Subversion version control system is very good. I wrote about Subversion in this post.

The big work project is a mixture of Delphi and Visual C++ with a fair bit of C. Automating the Delphi bit was ok but the Visual C++ stuff has been challenging, though no fault of VBP. Our project uses Makefiles, all 115 of them. VBP uses DSPs, Visual C++ Project file. So I've had a one off manual conversion task that is onerous to put it mildly. I did consider automating it and possibly still could but it's the old classic connundrum- can you do it manually in the time it would take do to write it (and debug it) in code?

I'll write a bigger review of VBP shortly but if you're in the market for a new Build Manager on Win 32, take the 30 day trial for a spin. Highly Recommended.