You Provide the Nose

"You Provide the Nose; We Provide the Grindstone"

This quotation is from a small poster we had in the NT Build Lab. The following are the tools that do the grinding to ensure that everything is as sharp as it can be. I will touch on what these tools are and then recommend the best ones to use that will be inline with Microsoft's future tool releases.

Make or NMake

NMake is a Windows version of Make. Stu Feldman originally designed Make for UNIX in 1979. The two tools work the same, but I will speak toward NMake because I am more familiar with it than with Make. (I do not know where Stu got the name Make or why the Windows version is called NMake.) When you run NMake, it reads a "makefile" that you supply. A makefile sometimes called a description file is a text file containing a set of instructions that NMake uses to build your project. The instructions consist of description blocks, macros, directives, and inference rules. Each description block typically lists a target (or targets), the target's dependents, and the commands that build the target. NMake compares the time stamp on the target file with the time stamp on the dependent files. If the time stamp of any dependent is the same as or later than the time stamp of the target, NMake updates the target by executing the commands listed in the description block.

NMake's main purpose is to help you build programs quickly and easily. However, NMake is not limited to compiling and linking; it can run other types of programs and can execute operating system commands. You can use NMake to prepare backups, move files, and perform other project-management tasks that you ordinarily do at the operating system prompt.

In this file, the term "build," as in building a target, means evaluating the time stamps of a target and its dependent and, if the target is out of date, executing the commands associated with the target.

The downside of NMake is the not-so-intuitive syntax that seems to stump a lot of people.

ANT or NANT

NANT is a .NET variation of ANT (Another Neat Tool) developed by James Duncan Davidson and owned by the Apache Software Foundation. Instead of an NMake model in which the tool is extended with command-prompt calls, ANT is extended using Java classes. Instead of writing shell commands, the configuration files are based on XML, calling out a target tree in which various tasks are executed. Each task is run by an object that implements a particular task interface.

The real difference between the Make tools and the ANT tools is the command you can use (command shell versus Java classes) and the syntax (kludgy Make syntax or nice readable XML code). Other than that, with a little hand-waving, you can get either tool to do whatever is necessary to get your build to work.