Overview

VisualMake will become indispensable in your build process if:

• Your product consists of more than 1 Visual Basic Project
• Your product utilizes component centric development (ActiveX Components)
• You need to produce product builds on frequent basis
• Your development team is struggling with build related problems, e.g. "ActiveX component can't create object" messages.
• To produce a build takes more than 1 man-hour.

Key Benefits

• Build any number of Visual Basic 5.0, 6.0, Visual C++ 6.0, Visual Basic .NET and C#.NET projects from one single environment. (.NET and VC++ support available in v3.0 only)
• Producing a build becomes a hands-free task. Initiate your build with a single mouse click or schedule it to run automatically using the command line interface
• Tremendous productivity boost, especially for large-scale projects. Our case studies show build time reductions from over 4 hours to only 15 minutes
• A sharp decline in build and deployment related issues, which are typically associated with a manual build process.
• Intuitive and easy to use
• Virtually effortless initial setup
• Interdependencies between your projects are automatically detected and the components are compiled in correct order, thus eliminating the chances of outdated references
• No more manual fixing of invalid references, they are taken care of automatically
• Save time by performing incremental builds, no need to rebuild up-to-date components
• Batch-build any number of build configurations with a single mouse click (v3.0 only)
• Modify properties of multiple projects in one go
• Run custom pre-/post-build tasks (build steps)
• Run custom build tasks before/after a component is compiled (project level pre-/post-build tasks) (v3.0 only)
• Apply uniform version numbers and file version information to all components
• No script files, no coding. Completely UI driven design simplifies maintenance of your build process
• Free and responsive technical support

Features

With VisualMake you can:

Resolve VB projects interdependencies
This is very useful when your product has complex hierarchical structure. VisualMake scans the Microsoft Windows registry and resolve the dependency conflicts:

Produce interdependencies documentation
Visual Make produces a dependency tree report. This illustrates the project dependency structure and can be used for analysis of project optimization strategy

Modify Visual Basic Project files to point to correct references and components
Visual Make will save your projects with correct references before it compiles them.

Perform incremental builds
Visual Make can build only those components that require rebuilding. It results in saving time necessary to complete build process.

Inform you about the build status using text to speech technology
Visual Make uses the Microsoft Agent component. You let the build run in the background and you will be informed about the build status in plain English.

Modify properties of multiple projects in one shot
When compiling a build you may want to set the version number in every VB project. This can be a very time consuming operation if you have more than 2 or 3 projects. VisualMake allows you to cast most of project properties such as version number, binary compatibility and others across all VB projects comprising your product.

Maintain products that contain a combination of Visual Basic 5.0 and 6.0 components in the same VisualMake file
Whether its making the migration from VB 5.0 to 6.0 or working in one or the other. VisualMake fulfills your VB component building needs.

Edit projects in the Visual Basic development environment without leaving Visual Make
In the familiar explorer style interface. Opening a project to determine the causes of any halted builds, is one click away.

Save hours of development time
VisualMake enables you to use multiple instances of the Visual Basic compiler, so projects that do not have interdependencies will be compiled simultaneously.

User Interface Tour

Main Screen

Targets Pane
This pane shows all your projects currently loaded into VisualMake. The targets are arranged in a certain order, which is determined based on dependencies between your projects; the less dependent projects are compiled first, the most dependent ones last. The highest level nodes show the name of the EXE, DLL or OCX that would be generated as a result of compilation, as well as the version number of the target file if one already exists. The child nodes show the name of the pertinent VB project and controls and type libraries that are referenced by the project. An icon with red background means that the target is out-of-date and needs to be recompiled because some of the project components or references have changed after the target's last compile.

Properties Pane
This pane displays more information about the item currently selected in Targets pane.

Status Pane
Used to output information about current activity, as well as compile results during a build. Compile errors and other failures are shown in red color, warnings in blue.

Dependency Tree

To view the dependency tree select Dependency Tree from All Projects menu. You can use this feature to examine the dependency structure of your projects and for documentation purposes.

The idea of this feature is to establish a parent-child relationship between the projects based on references of each project. Also, VisualMake uses this information to establish the right order of compilation. The highest level nodes of the tree represent your projects currently loaded into VisualMake. The children of each of these nodes represent the projects that depend on the project they are branched off, meaning they reference the project represented by the parent node either directly or indirectly.