At work I’ve been experimenting with Visual Build Pro. Our existing build system is well let’s say very backwardly compatible … as far back as Dos so a new version control system and a new Build Manager.

The Build Manager I’ve been looking at is Visual Build Pro (VBP) by Kinook Software and it’s very nice and at £200, very reasonably priced. I got up to speed with it very quickly and it’s clear that the designers have probably used it on their own projects as everyting is well thought out. Integration with Subversion is very good.

The big work project is a mixture of Delphi and Visual C++ with a fair bit of C. Automating the Delphi bit was ok but the Visual C++ stuff has been ‘fun’. Our project uses Make files, all 115 of them. VBP uses DSPs, the Visual Studio Project file. So I’ve had a one off manual conversion task. I did consider automating it and possibly still could but it’s the old classic connundrum- can you do it manually in the time it would take do to it in code?