Earlier today I ran a webinar titled “Accelerating your Visual Studio Build Environment with CloudBees Accelerator”. It was a short and concise 20 minute presentation followed by Q&A, highlighting the overall value proposition of CloudBees Accelerator while also discussing the new capabilities and features of the CloudBees Accelerator Visual Studio Add-in 4.0.
The webinar was well-attended with quite a few interesting questions asked by the attendees at the end of the session, which I thought would be interesting to share more broadly via this blog:
Q: How do I configure CloudBees Accelerator in Visual Studio?
A: Configuration of CloudBees Accelerator in a Visual Studio environment has been vastly improved in the 4.0 release of the Visual Studio Add-in. Basically you install CloudBees Accelerator on your developer desktop where Visual Studio is already running, and you are good to go. For more details, I refer you to the official CloudBees Accelerator Installation available here , or our public forum at http://ask.electric-cloud.com .Can we invoke CloudBees Accelerator programmatically or in batch-mode, like e.g. team build in Visual Studio?
A: Absolutely, both the developer edit-compile-test cycle and headless batch-builds (e.g. CI/release-builds) are key CloudBees Accelerator use cases.Q: I have more than 1000 projects in my Visual Studio application, can CloudBees Accelerator handle such scale? How are dependencies handled in such a use case?
A: CloudBees Accelerator is proven to handle gigantic software builds, but I’m not sure Visual Studio itself can scale to handle 1000+ projects in a single solution - so let’s assume you have partitioned your application in multiple solution files. CloudBees Accelerator supports building the entire application as a single build through a top-level invocation using ecdevenv where you can pass in multiple solution files. Dependencies will be managed and optimized across the entire build structure, just as with any CloudBees Accelerator build.Q: Is CloudBees Accelerator an add-on or a competitor to TFS?
A: CloudBees Accelerator is not competing with TFS, but complementing it by accelerating the build part of any TFS workflow.Q: Does CloudBees Accelerator work for Windows Phone applications?
A: Yes, as long as your Windows Phone application is implemented using C++ or C# in a supported version of Visual Studio, CloudBees Accelerator will work.Q: What versions of Visual Studio does CloudBees Accelerator support?
A: CloudBees Accelerator supports all currently available versions of Visual Studio – 2005, 2008, 2010 and 2012. CloudBees will also aim to announce support for Visual Studio 2013 as soon as it is generally available later in the year.Q: Does CloudBees Accelerator integrate with any other build tools like Visual Build?
A: CloudBees Accelerator integrates and works with any tool where you can integrate at command-line level, including Visual Build.Q: Is CloudBees Accelerator available for try?
A: Yes, CloudBees Accelerator is available for immedadiate download and try at http://www.electric-cloud.com/eade .Q: Does CloudBees Accelerator uses its own compiler and toolchain?
A: CloudBees Accelerator is a toolchain-agnostic build tool which is extremely good at parallelizing and distributing build tasks, including e.g. the compiler and linker. As such it will leverage whatever tools (compilers, linkers, etc.) that is defined by the build process.Q: Does CloudBees Accelerator support C# projects?
A: Yes. CloudBees Accelerator will accelerate large C# solutions. The larger number of projects the solution contains, the larger the potential for CloudBees Accelerator to provide value.For your reference, below is a direct link to the webinar:
If you are interested in giving CloudBees Accelerator a try, please download a free trial of CloudBees Accelerator Developer Edition
. Also, please don’t hesitate to use
if you have any questions.