Chapter 13: Mastering the Build Process

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Therefore, when we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for the present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for….

—John Ruskin

Overview

Ruskin had the advantage of being an architect (of the sort who works with buildings, not with source code). Those of us who build software are lucky if what we build lasts a year, and often we can’t even manage a day before some tester comes back and tells us that the roof is caving in. But some teams are in even worse trouble: They can’t build their application at all, at least not in a documented, reliable, repeatable way. In this chapter, I’ll look at the importance of having a formal build process, and show you some of the many .NET tools available to make this process easier.

If you’ve never run across the concept of a build process, it may need some explaining. The idea is fairly simple. Putting all the pieces of your software together, from the source code to the help files to the setup program, is too important to be left to chance. A build process might be a manual checklist of everything that you need to do to produce your application from source files, but these days it’s much more likely that all or most of your build process will be automated.

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