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2005-02-16
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AutomatedQA Corporation of Las Vegas, Nevada has announced version 1.3 of Automated Build Studio (ABS), a software build, test, and release management system. The company says that ABS lets users automate software builds, testing, profiling, back-up processes, system checks, and other repetitive tasks. Then developers and testers can create deployment packages, and write them to CD or DVD. ABS has over 200 built-in operations, which help the person with his hand on the button to run automated test scripts and profilers, label sources in version control systems, perform automated builds as scheduled tasks, register COM and .NET components, compile help files, and much more.
New to version 1.3 are ten operations that allow the developer to control COM objects, processes, or services locally or across the network. Other new operations support executable compression, encryption, and protection. Version 1.3 also supports QSC's Team Coherence, and extends support for Delphi 2005 with operations specific to Win32 or .NET projects.
Robert Leahey, Director of Developer Relations for AutomatedQA Corporation, likes the tight integration between ABS and the Visual Studio.NET IDE, because you can run panels alone or integrated. "If a developer has a solution created in Visual Studio.NET, he can add macros that can be fired within Visual Studio," said Leahey.
Users can also create a macro once and apply various build configurations on the fly, if they have steps that are common between build types, according to Leahey. "In competitors' products, you have branching for different types of builds. We can have a single macro with a minimum number of operations, and have a debug configuration, a release configuration, [and so on]," said Leahey.
Three scripting languages are supported: VB Script, Jscript, and DelphiScript. "What a lot of people miss is the little IDE built in where people can store code snippets," said Leahey, who claims there's a "very robust, drop-down code completion list, and scripting capabilities that are scary good, they're so powerful." Leahey says the logging capabilities aren't static, but can keep track of things like the last successful run, and profile your builds. The company claims ABS supports dozens of third party tools.
Dustin Campbell is Development Lead for Developer Express, Inc. of Las Vegas, Nevada, where he is working on an IDE called CodeRush, a productivity add-in for Visual Studio.NET. "It's a complex product to build — we had to use Automated Build Studio," said Campbell. Their previous, custom tool would require continuing resources. "Automated Build Studio does far more than we're even using. Since converting our build process to Automated Build Studio, we've been able to grow our project without any problems," said Campbell. "Say I wanted to schedule a build and copy it up to an FTP site," said Campbell. "I would have had to add that to our own tool; now it's just part of the package."
Campbell finds ABS more convenient for team communications about builds. Developer Express was forced to do certain things by hand before ABS, such as installing and uninstalling assemblies to the Global Assembly Cache. "That comes out of the box with ABS," says Campbell. "ABS builds our entire suite of three IDE tools with one click of the run button."
Campbell started using ABS at version 1.0 and is now using 1.3. "With each version we've had requests. With every version they've added every feature I've asked for," he says. Campbell appreciates being able to script, fine tune, and write to the open architecture. "The flexibility is just unbelievable," Campbell says. "It's really the only thing at this level that I'm aware of."
Tom Lewis is Senior Software Developer for Ipswitch, Inc., of Lexington, Massachusetts, publisher of the WS-FTP file transfer protocol utility and other tools. Lewis said ABS has features that take care of just about everything, either with a direct plug-in for a step in the build process or with the Execute Program operation. "(ABS) is extremely easy to learn and use. It only took a few minutes to look over the system and get things running," Lewis said. In fact, he downloaded the free demo and created a macro without checking out the help. Lewis still only sneaks a peek at help for AutomatedMacroPlayer's command line parameters.
Lewis likes to take what is multi-user, multi-computer and/or multi-environment, and use the magic of build macros and modularity to make them more like one-button success stories. A single macro pulls C++ source code and compiles the source, for example. "ABS employs a standard user interface that most developers will be familiar with. The logic behind the 'build macro' concept fits in well with what developers are used to seeing in other development environments," said Lewis.
Automated Build Studio Requires Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 or Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3 or later. A 30-day evaluation version is available. The software costs $349.99 per user, or $2,999.99 for a site license with unlimited users.
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