Chapter 7. The Build Environment

Philosophy: There are two ways of being creative. One can sing and dance. Or one can create an environment in which singers and dancers flourish.

Warren G. Bennis, author of bestselling book, On Becoming a Leader

Every build process that I have ever seen has a build environment, even if the people using it are not aware of it. This is the way things should be. GUI (Graphical User Interface) or visual build tools are good if you are short on resources and are willing to give up your control of the build process to another company's build tool. As mentioned in Chapter 5, "Build Tools and Technologies," the majority of the build labs at Microsoft use command-line tools to build software and not some kind of visual shell not even the Visual Studio IDE (Integrated Development Environment). The key to setting up a reproducible, consistent build is to create the correct build environment and standardize it throughout the team.

Microsoft Sidenote: What to Do with Old Build Machines

When we released the first three versions of NT, we were so worried about not being able to re-create a working build environment that we would take the machines that were used for builds and move them to the side, reserving those specific boxes for hotfix or service pack builds. For example, when NT 3.5 shipped, we moved the build machines to the back of the lab and bought new hardware to build NT 3.51. By doing this, we did not have to worry about rebuilding and reconfiguring a build machine, and we were able to rebuild the code exactly the way we did when the product shipped. I realize that this is not practical for most products or groups, but you might be able to adopt something similar such as setting up a "build farm" that contains several machines with the appropriate images available to re-create a build machine rather quickly. The NT build team no longer archives build machines because a separate division handles the source and fixes after the product ships.

This chapter presents an example of how to set up a build environment using batch (or command) files and nmake. The example is targeted for a Wintel application. If you are unfamiliar with nmake and want to learn more about the tool, see www.microsoft.com/technet/itsolutions/cits/interopmigration/unix/unixbld/unixbld1.mspx. However, you do not need to be familiar with the nmake syntax. What is more important is how the environment is set up and used to build. The examples in the chapter can be used with any build tool whether it is ANT, MSBuild, or VCBuild; just switch out the reference to the tool. This is how every build environment should be set up; it should just be a matter of finding/replacing a tool name and the location in the files.