Dependency Management Saves the Day: How to Manage Dependencies Across Multiple Versions of Visual Studio SDK with CloudBees Accelerator

One of the biggest differentiators for CloudBees Accelerator is the ability to build software FAST without compromising correctness. It achieves that with our unique dependency detection and management technologies. One of the perks of working as a product manager is learning from the our customers; they may not always use the product as we initially intended, but they are intelligent and creative in using the product to solve their problem. I recently spent time with a top Fortune 100 company that is using CloudBees Accelerator to precisely manage dependencies across multiple versions of Visual Studio SDK.

Visual Studio doesn't support more than one version of the SDK in a single solution file. So what would you do? Would you:

• Upgrade and converge your VS SDK version?

• Have someone manually figure and maintain dependencies?

• Build everything serially all the time?

The list sounds like bad to worse? And how can you possibly be agile with a product like that? Our customer uses 3 different versions of VS SDK per product . Altogether there are more than 800 projects . So then they asked us, "can you help?" Hm. Sure!

In comes CloudBees Accelerator:

• We built their product using CloudBees Accelerator and ElectricInsight to identify the dependencies among the projects and captured them in a makefile.

• Dependencies were identified at the file access level with the ElectricInsight API.

• This construct then allowed our customer to build in parallel.

• ElectricInsight gives us enough transparency and control such that we can specify/deduce a makefile that ensures no two versions of the SDK are in use at the same time so that the project could run successfully.

Voila!

The result?

Full builds that used to take more than 2 hours now only take a little over 10 minutes to build. More importantly, this left business decisions to the business and agility is regained. How do you do it? let us know in the comments below. Need help managing your dependencies? shoot us an email