At Developer Express Incorporated, Research and Development is the heart of the business. During the development of the DXCore framework, the IDE tools team noticed that their build process needed improvement, so they turned to Automated Build Studio for help.

Solving an Ever Growing Build Process

The build process for DXCore involves building several Visual Studio solutions, obfuscating and signing assemblies, installing assemblies to the global assembly cache (GAC) and registering assemblies with COM. At the very beginning of the project, this was done manually. Each solution was loaded and built and a complicated batch file was executed. As DXCore grew, this process became extremely laborious and a custom tool was developed to better automate the build process. As the project continued to grow, the custom tool had to be modified to grow with the expanded build process and this took an increasing amount of time. "With the looming release of Visual Studio^® 2005 Beta 1, we were faced with a large update to our custom tool and decided to look into alternatives that would provide the needed flexibility to manage our growing build process," said Dustin Campbell from Developer Express.

Choosing Automated Build Studio

Dustin explained, "There wasn’t much of decision when it came to choosing Automated Build Studio over the other tools on the market. We were familiar with AutomatedQA and their reputation of producing excellent tools. After installing Automated Build Studio, it was clear that it contained everything that our build process required and much more!"

Automated Build Studio and the Build Process

The regular build process for DXCore, CodeRush and Refactor is done using Automated Build Studio on each team member’s machine. "Each morning, I download the latest source from our source control and fire up Automated Build Studio to build the latest source on my machine. This allows me to start my day with a build of the DXCore, CodeRush and Refactor containing the latest bug fixes and features," said Dustin.

Development of the DXCore, CodeRush and Refactor is currently done in Visual Studio^® .NET 2003 but releases are built under Visual Studio^® .NET 2002 after the solution and project files are processed with a custom conversion tool. "Using Automated Build Studio, we were able to satisfy both of these situations from within the same macro."

Dustin explained that using Automated Build studio "is a more reliable build process that is less-prone to human error. In addition, by using Automated Build Studio, we have discovered ways to improve our development process. Development time no longer has to be spent manually building the project or enhancing our own custom built tools."

Key Benefits

"The two benefits that really helped Developer Express are the product's ability to handle almost any build scenario and the willingness of the AutomatedQA's support and development teams to improve the product," said Dustin.

Developer Express Recommends Automated Build Studio

Dustin recommends: "Don’t hesitate! The money that you spend will be offset by the money that you save purchasing stress-relief and hair-loss products."