Some time ago I reported serious problems that prevented me from compiling my projects using AutomatedBuildStudio from Automated QA. I already had some support emails going back and forth but the solutions was nowhere near.
So, I decided to switch to FinalBuilder and installed the trial version. That was a good experience and it got me going with my projects in a half a day.
I still was in contact with AutomatedQA though and they asked an opportunity to try to solve the problem. I gave them the length of the trial period of FinalBuilder (which is a month). To make a long story short: I ended up letting an AutomatedQA programmer take over my developers computer (using the ever excellent TeamViewer) and after an hour or so fiddling with configuration files, temporary files during the build, et cetera, they concluded to have found an offending compiler setting generating during the build process.
They promissed a solution by the next day and they delivered that. Compiling my projects works fine again.
That makes me happy for a couple of things:
1) Apparently the problems of a single use does mean a thing to AutomatedQA. They could have said: sorry we lost you, but there's nothing we can do. They didn't do that and really digged in.
2) I discovered a problem with FinalBuilder and Wise v6 in creating installer packages. After a compilation of the Wise package from Finaler Builder, the Wise project is damaged and from that point on unusable. I had to compiling my packages 'by hand' which was pretty unconvenient. I'm sure I would have found some sort of automated build process if I had to stick with FinalBuilder, but it wasn't as problem free as I first thought.
Most important of all, I can still use my original build scripts, which are pretty advanced and saved me a lot of time in the past and now probably will do in the future.
Just to let you know and to do justice to the support team of AutomatedQA. It just tells me again that having great support pays off in the end to both parties.
Bye,
Bart
Saturday, September 06, 2008
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2 comments:
I can't comment on those two build tools (I have only used Nant so far) but I know that particular Wise problem. I think their compiler is really flawed. Usually when I get an invalid build (which I get for about 10% of my compiles) I simply compile again and the next build is fine.
While I don't use Wise For Windows 6 anymore, I never had any trouble compiling Wsie .wsi fiels with FinalBuilder. All FinalBuilder is doing is calling the the wfwi executable. Were you doing any XLST transforms on the .wsi or .msi files?
I did have other issues with Wise, which is why I dropped it a year ago for InstallAware. The quality and the functionality of my setup projects went way up, and the number of of requests to tech support went way down.
I do agree that AutomatedQA's technical support is very good. I don't use their build tool, but I do use AQTime and it's a great product.
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