Visual Build Professional

Visual Build Professional is a comprehensive application made for developers who want to quickly piece together their software packages. It supports Microsoft Visual Studio .NET/2005, Visual Studio Team System, Visual Basic, Visual C++, SourceSafe, eMbedded Tools, Borland Developer Studio, Delphi, JBuilder, C++Builder, and ClearCase, among others.

Wrapped up in a professional-looking GUI with a clear-cut structure, the program lists all possible actions and steps required to create and complete a project.

It enables you to create a database, copy files and get the latest ones, verify sources and executables, set registry entries for the process executables, as well as build VB6 and VC6 projects, virtual directories, along with projects written in VS.NET 2003 and VS 2005 through 2012.

It's also possible to generate a build manifest, check in all files, as well as increment the build number and add labels. As for finishing touches, you can set up email notifications on completion, make log shortcuts, write log files, and generate HTML logs.

Evidently, each of these steps comes with its own set of configurable parameters, and they are neatly organized to avoid any confusions.

Visual Build Professional lets you manage local and global subroutine stages, macros and failure steps (e.g. undo source or exe checkout), view the call stack, access the script editor to change lines of code, as well as to insert new actions at any point in the project.

The complete list of available actions is quite extensive and it covers system-wide commands (e.g. exit a build or subroutine), compression (e.g. create or test a 7-Zip archive), Embarcadero/Borland (e.g. make C++ builder), files (e.g. burn CD/DVD, calculate file checksum), help authoring (e.g. help and manual, RoboHelp), installers (e.g. Inno Setup, MSI Factory), localization (Multilizer, Sisulizer), Microsoft (e.g. MSBuild), Microsoft .NET (e.g. generate resource files), network (e.g. FTP, HTTP, map drive), server (e.g. ADO, COM register), test driven development (e.g. Ant, NUnit), version control (e.g. Bazaar, Git), virtual machines (e.g. VirtualBox, Hyper-V) and others (e.g. batch files, kill process, play sound).

It's possible to use a search-and-replace function, inspect the last error, rebuild the project, create and manage scheduled tasks via the built-in Windows feature, administer user options for Visual Build Professional, customize the toolbar, commands, keyboard shortcuts, menus and other settings, undo and redo actions, password-protect the project file, as well as save the project to file to resume it later.

We haven't come across any difficulties in our tests, thanks to the fact that the program didn't freeze, crash or display error messages. Surprisingly, it had minimal impact on computer performance, using low CPU and RAM.

Taking into account its rich options and configuration settings wrapped up in a professional and approachable interface that lets you focus on each project step at a time, Visual Build Professional proves to be a reliable assistant for aiding you in building software products.