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Howard van Rooijen's Blog

Conchango.Build.TaskBuilder: A Visual Designer for Microsoft SDC Build Scripts

Updated 06/11/2006: If you are trying to locate the Netron Project see my post "What happened to the Netron Project?"

TaskBuilder was my second xmas holiday project. I started it before AssemblyReflector, but then needed a mechanism for Code Generating all of the shape classes so that I could save hours of time by not having to write all the classes by hand. I used AssemblyReflector to generate the shapes from interfaces I had derived from the Microsoft.Sdc.Configuration.Build.1.2.xsd schema.

The genesis of TaskBuilder came from two sources – firstly my desire to really get to grips with Francois Vanderseypen’s amazing Netron Project and secondly my desire to make the creation and maintenance of build scripts something far less laborious and prone to easy mistakes.

The idea for a visual designer for creating Microsoft SDC Build Scripts has been floating around in my head for a long while; I just lacked the time and the tools. Then at the beginning of December I read Sam Newman’s post “FreeMind as an Ant GUI” and it made me realise that Netron would be the perfect enabler for build script visualisation.

The image below shows TaskBuilder editing the demo DailyBuild.Config file.

TaskBuilder editing DailyBuild.Config

Conchango.Build.TaskBuilder can be downloaded from my ProjectDistributor workspace.

Published 07 February 2005 08:33 by howard.vanrooijen

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TrackBack said:

February 10, 2005 11:08
 

TrackBack said:

February 10, 2005 12:30
 

howard.vanrooijen said:

IS the source available? I've create my own tasks for working with subversion and would like to augment your tools for them.

February 11, 2005 15:50
 

howard.vanrooijen said:

Hi,

Yes - that's the plan - exactly like I did with AssemblyReflector.

I haven't released it yet because I'm not happy about the lack of comments etc and the fact that I want to refactor a large swathe of code so that people can easily support new types of tasks. I'm already working on support for WiX and MSBuild.

I also want to release the CodeSmith templates I used for generating the shapes from an XSD (thus supporting things like WiX and MSBuild should be a trivial affair)

Keep an eye on the project for updates.
February 11, 2005 15:54
 

howard.vanrooijen said:

If it's possibe can I also have access to the source code? I want to make something like the scripts that you made... but envolving PL/SQL commands... together with email.. and others things...


reg. AM
February 11, 2005 19:31
 

TrackBack said:

February 26, 2005 14:19
 

TrackBack said:

March 31, 2005 17:09
 

Gaurav.Gajjar said:

I would love to see the new version and try my hands out on the same once it is realeasd

April 3, 2008 07:58

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