Build Automator Blog

8 years ago the famous Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software) wrote an article on his blog about the "12 steps to Better Code" In the article he presented his "Joel Test" for software developers to take in order to measure the quality of their software operation. His second step was called "Can you make a build in one step?"

This is a reasonable question, particularly when you need to create builds on regular basis for Q&A teams to follow up on the work of the development teams. Often times this particular thing can be a daunting and error prone process and is often not done by software companies. This has been particularly difficult for Clarion developers because Clarion does not have a command line compiler, rather relies on DDE to control the Integrated Development Environment.

The Build Automator has changed all this. Because the Build Automator is written with Clarion in mind it fully supports the DDE communication to the Clarion IDE. We will also be adding actions this summer that can register templates and run utility templates. That will make it easy for example to rebuild your template registry from scratch. Rebuilding the registry is something that we would reccommend doing on semi-regular basis to keep the registry clean.

The Build Automator is not just for the old IDE, which will be replaced with the new Clarion 7 and Clarion# IDEs soon. The Build Automator has an action that calls MS-Build to compile any project or project solution that can be compiled with MS-Build. This includes any Visual Studio solutions/projects as well as Delphi. But more importantly this also includes the new Clarion IDE that is used in both Clarion 7 and Clarion#. So with the Build Automator you can pretty much cover all the major development tool, including most Clarion versions. On the Clarion front we have only really tested the Build Automator with the Clarion 6.3 IDE and the new Clarion 7 IDE. It should, however, work without problems with the older Clarion 5.5, Clarion 5.0 and Clarion 4.0 versions.

Many Clarion developers use the excellent Setup Builder from LinderSoft. The Build Automator was written with SetupBuilder in mind and in fact, Lindersoft has made several updates and changes to the SetupBuilder to accommodate the Build Automator. So the Build Automator is the perfect match for SetupBuilder users! You can now build your SetupBuilder installs with a single press of a button using the Build Automator. This is particularly efficient when doing web update builds. You can set the new version number in one place in the Build Automator and it will take care of the rest. We have been using the Build Automator for a few months now on our own installs, including the Build Automator installs, so you could say that the Build Automator has been building itself.