The Build Master: Microsoft's Software Configuration Management Best Practices (Addison-Wesley Microsoft Technology Series) (Paperback)

by Vincent Maraia (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Say what you will about Microsoft, they know how to successfully build and release software. Vince Maraia has been a key member of the build teams for many of their major software releases over the last fifteen years. In this book he distills the wisdom he has learned about building software, while also setting it into the context of related steps, including configuration management and deployment. While he uses Microsoft tools and case studies from within Microsoft, the book is as tool-agnostic as possible, to make the ideas applicable to the broadest possible range of readers. The book is written so that each chapter builds upon the previous one, following the standard development schedule; however, each chapter can also stand alone as a reference to that particular piece of the process. Microsoft has been so successful at developing build procedures that work that they will be incorporating many of them in the forthcoming suite of products called Visual Studio 2005 Team System, so this book is being released at a very opportune time.

From the Back Cover

"Wow, what can I say? Chapter 4, 'The Build Lab and Personnel,' by itself is enough justification to purchase the book! Vince is obviously a 'Dirty Finger Nails' build meister and there is a lot we can all learn from how he got them dirty! There are so many gems of wisdom throughout this book it's hard to know where to start describing them! It starts where SCM should start, at the end, and works its way forward. This book is a perfect complement to the 'Follow the Files' approach to SCM that I espouse. I will recommend that every software lead and software configuration management person I work with be required to read this book!"

—Bob Ventimiglia, autonomic logistics software configuration manager, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics

"The Build Master contains some truly new information; most of the chapters discuss points that many people in the industry don't have a full understanding of and need to know. It's written in a way that is easy to read and will help a reader fill holes in their vision regarding software build management. I especially liked Vince's use of Microsoft stories to make his points throughout the book. I will purchase the book and make certain chapters mandatory reading for my build manager consultants."

—Steve Konieczka, SCM consultant

"Vince does a great job of providing the details of an actual working build process. It can be very useful for those who must tackle this task within their own organization. Also the 'Microsoft Notes' found throughout the book provide a very keen insight into the workings of Microsoft. This alone is worth purchasing this book."

—Mario E. Moreira, author of Software Configuration Management Implementation Roadmap and columnist at CM Crossroads

"Software configuration management professionals will find this book presents practical ideas for managing code throughout the software development and deployment lifecycles. Drawing on lessons learned, the author provides real-world examples and solutions to help you avoid the traps and pitfalls common in today's environments that require advanced and elegant software controls."

—Sean W. Sides, senior technical configuration manager, Great-West Healthcare Information Systems

"If you think compiling your application is a build process, then this book is for you. Vince gives us a real look at the build process. With his extensive experience in the area at Microsoft, a reader will get a look in at the Microsoft machine and also how a mature build process should work. This is a must read for anyone doing serious software development."

—Jon Box, Microsoft regional director, ProTech Systems Group

"Did you ever wonder how Microsoft manages to ship increasingly complex software? In The Build Master, specialist Vince Maraia provides an insider's look."

—Bernard Vander Beken, software developer, jawn.net

"This book offers an interesting look into how Microsoft manages internal development of large projects and provides excellent insight into the kinds of build/SCM things you can do for your large-scale projects."

—Lance Johnston, vice president of Software Development, SCM Labs, Inc.

"The Build Master provides an interesting insight into how large software systems are built at Microsoft covering the set up of their build labs and the current and future tools used. The sections on security, globalization, and versioning were quite helpful as these areas tend to be overlooked."

—Chris Brown, ThoughtWorks, consultant

"The Build Master is a great read. Managing builds is crucial to the profitable delivery of high-quality software. Until now, the build process has been one of the least-understood stages of the entire development lifecycle. This book helps you implement a smoother, faster, more effective build process and use it to deliver better software."

—Robert J. Shimonski, Networking and Security Expert, http://www.rsnetworks.net

The first best-practice, start-to-finish guide for the software build process

Managing builds is crucial to the profitable delivery of high-quality software; however, the build process has been one of the least-understood stages of the entire development lifecycle. Now, one of Microsoft's leading software build experts introduces step-by-step best practices for maximizing the reliability, effectiveness, timeliness, quality, and security of every build you create.

Drawing on his extensive experience working with Microsoft's enterprise and development customers, Vincent Maraia covers all facets of the build process—introducing techniques that will work on any platform, on projects of any size. Maraia places software builds in context, showing how they integrate with configuration management, setup, and even customer support. Coverage includes

• How Microsoft manages builds: process flows, check-in windows, reporting status, and more

• Understanding developer and project builds, pre- and post-build steps, clean builds, incremental builds, continuous integration builds, and more

• Choosing the right build tools for your projects

• Configuring source trees and establishing your build environment—introducing Virtual Build Labs (VBLs)

• Planning builds for multiple-site development projects or teams

• Determining what should (and shouldn't) be kept under source control

• Managing versioning, including build, file, and .NET assembly versions

• Using automation as effectively as possible

• Securing builds: a four layer approach—physical, tracking sources, binary/release bits assurance, and beyond

Builds powerfully impact every software professional: developers, architects, managers, project leaders, configuration specialists, testers, and release managers. Whatever your role, this book will help you implement a smoother, faster, more effective build process—and use it to deliver better software.

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; illustrated edition edition (October 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321332059
• ISBN-13: 978-0321332059
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #105,249 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a centralised build process, November 5, 2005

By	W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

If you have a team of 30 or more programmers, then Maraia offers good suggestions on how to design your build processes so that these can both handle your current team, and scale up to hundreds or even thousands of programmers. The book uses Microsoft's own development effort as the central case study. Given that Microsoft has massive software development efforts, you may want to pay attention.

The book can be read at two levels. One is if you want to use the development tools from Microsoft, that the book talks about. If your team works under a Microsoft operating system, and uses Visual Studio, then indeed, this can be germane.

But you don't have to be using any Microsoft product at all, to reap some gain from the text. The key idea is to have a group of developers who maintain a centralised build process. (They can certainly have other duties.) Here, the book argues about having a metalevel, if you will. Where this build process can and will change over the project's lifetime. If the project has several subgroups, as it will if it is large enough, then each subgroup uses this same central build to make its own binaries.

The centralising fights a natural tendency for a large project to have subgroups that drift apart. In part by imposing a top-down discipline on the subgroups to have their developments conform to this build.

The book also goes into various good practices that your group should use. These have been covered in other books on software projects. The distinctive part of the text is the above discussion on the centralised build.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great concepts, missing details, April 5, 2006

By	John Janzen "Maplewood Software" (Spokane WA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Frequently building and testing the complete source code of a large project is a good idea - and The Build Master by Vincent Maraia gives the reader the inside scoop of how Microsoft accomplishes this. He clearly describes the best practices developed at Microsoft through trial and error relating to his central thesis: build frequently or continuously and test after each build. This is valuable information. What is missing from the book are the details and features of the software Microsoft uses to manage the process, and unfortunately, this is fairly critical information.

The book has 18 Chapters, but 14 of them make up the core of the material. Of these 14, 4 are about software tools and 1 is about a software tool nearly unique to Microsoft. Chapter 1 starts the book by defining just what Microsoft means by a build and Vincent steps through the issues and pitfalls related to his thesis of frequent builds through to chapter 14. Of these 14 very readable chapters, Chapter 2 is on source control software tools, Chapter 5 on build tools, Chapter 6 on a tool called SNAP used at Microsoft, and Chapter 13 on setup tools.

On SNAP, Vincent states, "I have seen similar tools at some customer sites, but none is fully automated or developed as well as the SNAP system." As a contractor on the team credited to development of SNAP, I will go further and say good luck implementing the continuous builds recommended without a tool like it. Fair disclosure: I was the key developer of SNAP, so I was there when the Netdocs team was trying to make it work. As a result, my perspective from the inside makes the book seems a little bit like a driver's instruction manual for a car when most readers only have bicycles. That doesn't mean the ideas are useless. My small development company of 10 people follows Vincent's advice verbatim and I can personally relate many experiences where these best practices made the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful project. But we use SNAP to do it.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great introduction to scale-up build; could lose some of the history for more details, November 20, 2005

By	Lars Bergstrom "LarsBerg" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If you're looking to critique your current build system or if you're about to scale from an ad-hoc build environment to a team of tens to hundreds of people, it would be good to pick up this book and get an understanding of one way that has been proven to scale. In addition, this book contains a lot of hard-earned knowledge about details of how to run a daily build and deal with any breaks that happen in them as well as how to specifically integrate some pieces of the Microsoft toolset in a way that will ensure that builds done on developer machines work the same as builds done in the build lab. You will come away from this book with a deep enough understanding to create a build lab and roll out a multi-site build environment.

People new to builds and who are enamored of continuous integration will also be interested in the chapter on SNAP. SNAP is an automated checkin system - rather than doing direct submissions to an SCC system, developers provide their change to SNAP, which does a full build/test verification to ensure that there are never build breaks. Why allow the main source code to contain breaks at all?

The one area this book could've improved was in the presentation of details. For example, it will be difficult for people outside of Microsoft to recreate a SNAP-like system given the high-level overview in the book. Also, the formatting of some of the textual files (like the XML files from ANT and MSBuild) wrapped excessively on the page, making it difficult to read.

Two caveats for honesty's sake: I was provided with a free copy of this book and met with Vincent when he was working on an early draft of this book. But speaking as the person who drove the creation of a unified build environment for Microsoft's Developer Division, this is the best presentation of the systems we use that is available outside of the company.