Automatic Code Builder

I guess basically what I''d like to do is to have a utility that can automatically build releases for me everyday and be able to email the build along with a list of errors (and possiblly a "features" list that still has to be done) to everybody on the team.

I don''t know of any off the top of my head, but I will throw this at you: under UNIX users have the cron facility (and anachron under Linux), which executes a command at a specific time. By combining cron and other available tools (Perl/sh or another scripting language), knocking together your own periodic code build utility isn''t terribly hard.

Now I assume you''re working under Windows rather than Linux (cos if you''re using Linux my only [appropriate] response is RTFM! ). There are schedulers available for all versions of Windows (NT-based Windows also have the at utility; Start Menu->Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Scheduled Tasks in Win2k); combine this with Perl or another utility of your own that runs your compiler from the commandline and parses its output for errors, logging them to a file. Perl is actually perfect for this since it was originally designed for extraction and reporting.

Hmm, maybe I''ll knock one up just for the fun of it.

Related links:
Download Perl DevKit@Active State

[ GDNet Start Here | GDNet FAQ | MS RTFM | STL | Google ]
Thanks to Kylotan for the idea!

I don''t know of a prepackaged tool, but...

Visual C++ comes with the NMAKE utility. You can export a workspace to a makefile and then run nmake against that file to build the projects in the workspace. NMAKE is a command line utility that''s well suited to scheduling / batch compiles.

The Visual C++ IDE also supports automation, so you could probably set up a Windows Scripting Host script to build / compile your workspace. The benefit of using WSH like that would be that you could also send an email with the binaries and a ''todo'' list if you wanted. Or you could call NMAKE from the WSH script.

Either way, if you have windows 9X with the plus pack, ME, 2K or XP then you can set up a scheduled task to run whatever script you come up with.


The company I work for spends large amounts of money on a team of people who do nothing but handle our build / package process. While there are tons of products to handle source code revision control, I''d think there would be more scheduling / automation solutions than there are.