Hi Roy, any idea of how the thing compares to Visual
Builder (from Kynook), for which Mike Gunderloy also had
quiet good comments recently? I'm very tempted in
investing time in such a tool for my team. However, my
concern is that with Team System being around, this
might not be a good "strategical"
choice. Or maybe one that I would have some difficulties
to explain to my boss (who is just reading the brochures
... saying that VSTS already includes a set of build
tools).
David: I've used both, and FB is much more usable. They
both share the same basic capabilites, but you could say
that Kinook's tool is somehow more "C++
oriented" that is, it's more of a barebones
powerful scripting engine, with less investment on
design and usability, while FB is much more "VB
oriented" meaning that it's much more usable
but still just as capable under the hood (more like
VB.NET than VB6 in that way..)
If I had a choice I'd go with something which is proven
to be worrkable - FB. It's pretty cheap to begin with,
and one could always start using VSTS if they wanted too
later. the other way around wouldn't work since the
investment is too big.
Personally, I find FB (right now) more lightweight, plus
it can be used to automate practically anything, not
only build. I've used it to deploy whole applications,
configure things, move stuff and basically any task that
is just begging to be automated can be done with this.
Team Build is (I believe) more targeted at
"building stuff" rather than anything
else. Plus, it does not have the cool design that FB has
right now. Perhaps that'll change in the future, but for
now, I have project to build, deploy and configure, and
the fastest way there for me is FB.
Final Builder and Visual Build are both pretty good, but
they cost money.
BuildIT from www.coderanger.com is free, simple, has a
lot of the most common 'tasks' like emails, zipping,
file management, ftp etc; but also has 2 generic tasks:
run a program and script that allows you to perform most
other functions required, I havent been able to find
anything I havent been able to do so far from backing up
mysql databases, to sending out email lists, from
building/testing/deploying new versions of our consumer
software.
Like the others, the author is receptive to changes,
comments and suggestions and tries to send out new
versions as often as he is able. He also has a blog, but
he doesnt post that often, as he does new builds each
time he makes a few changes ... although he did tell me
that he does want to blog more often.
Its well worth looking at, not least for a comparison
with more expensive alternatives.