22 August 2005
A bit late, but I realized after I posted the Recommended Reading List that I forgot to add Mike Clark's Pragmatic Project Automation, a great resource for ideas on how to automate various parts of your build cycle... and, more importantly, why this is such a necessary step. Although nominally a Java book, there's really nothing in here that couldn't also be adopted to a .NET environment, particularly now that NAnt and MSBuild are prevalent in .NET development shops all over the planet.
Most importantly, Mike indirectly points out a great lesson when he uses Groovy to script Ant builds: that you don't have to stick with just the tools that are given to you. Automation can take place in a variety of ways, and scripting languages (like Groovy, or Ruby, or Python...) are a great way to drive lower-level tools like Ant. Stu Halloway has begun talking about the same concept when he discusses "Unit Testing with Jython" at the NFJS shows. Coming from the .NET space? Then think about IronPython, or even the JScript implementation that comes out of the box with Visual Studio.
All in all, a highly-recommended read.
Last modified 22 August 2005