What is involved with making a "build"?

Question

Where I work we use a set schedule to build our applications. What is involved with builds? What is involved with getting an application to build somewhere other than at the local host?

Answer 1

I came across this just the other day... It helps clarify some things regarding building ASP.NET websites. Not a definitive answer, but worth a look.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/399f057w.aspx:

ASP.NET offers two options for precompiling a site:

Precompiling a site in place. This option is useful for existing sites where you want to enhance performance and perform error checking.

Precompiling a site for deployment. This option creates a special output that you can deploy to a production server.

Additionally, you can precompile a site to make it read-only or updatable. The following sections provide more details about each option.

Answer 2

The basic purpose of a build is to ensure that consistent set of all files needed for the website are deployed together.

This is typically accomplished by retrieving the files from source control, packaging them in an appropriate archive or archives (called artifacts of the build process) and then having scripts which send these files to the production or QA servers where the application is then launched.

Depending on the technology and the project, the build script might compile files, run tests, create archives, copy files to different locations and things of that nature.

There are different tools to support the build process to provide the underlying scripting ability. Build scripting can sometimes have unique properties, such as ensuring that a given task is only run once even though different parts of a larger build need to ensure that it is run (such as a task to create a directory to deploy artifacts, the directory is only created once and the build script engine (such as NAnt) makes sure that even if the task is called multiple times it is only run once per build.

If you want to understand more about builds, look around for some open source projects that use a technology you are familiar with, and look at their build proceedure (how you change code and deploy it).