Build process

[ducky]

Recently, I've been apart of a project creating a large vb6 application which involves 6 programmers doing team coding. Normally my definition of team has been me alone or myself and one other programmer. Since this is new territory for me, I wanted to ask what other programmers experiences have been in regards to the application build process for team projects.

Currently the application consists of an .exe and multiple .dlls. In short our build process has been one developer check out the source code and compile the application on their machine and that becomes the release. So can it be this simple? I'm thinking this can pose problems building on a developers pc and have considered using a separate pc for release builds only. Do others use isolated machines only for builds? Also our compilation procedure is a simple bat file that calls vb6 command line to compile each project. Are there any third party tools available for doing builds? So again any info on how others build their vb applications in a team coding environment?

[ntg]

I would think a build environment is absolutely necessary for anything larger than small applications (along with a bare test environment of course). We use a virtual machine as the build box to avoid having a pc dedicated for this role. For simple builds, a .bat file might do the job but once you start getting into source safe refreshes, help workshop builds, files copied around, copy protection schemes, setup project builds and things like that, you really need a tool to do the work properly. For .Net environments Nant does a great job, but for VB6 project I would suggest that you take a look at this tool.

Cheers,
NTG

[ducky]

Thanks for link ntg. That seems to be what I was looking for in a build tool. I'm going to give it a try.