Thanks go to Timothy Trimble and his review of BuildIT:
The ART of Software Development Awards - BuildIT

Its soo nice to get feedback, I do like to read user comments so please continue and I will do my best to keep up with requests in making BuildIT the product for you!

I would like to comment on some of Tim’s points…

• Copying and Moving whole folders recursively is a very good point, I will add that in next.

 

• Yes, help and documentation is severly lacking … I really must get my act together and do this, without it people are missing some of the really useful ‘hidden’ features like special macros that can be used in all tasks:
  $YYYY$ = replace with 4 digit year
  $MM$ = replace with 2 digit month
  $DD$ = replace with 2 digit day
  etc.   

  A full list of the macros supported can be found from the Help menu in BuildIT.

  Also, unlike other tools, BuildIT comes with a command line version “buildit.com” as standard. You can even use the “Schedule Run” command (Run menu) to auto-generate a task in Windows Task Scheduler with the appropriate options for running your build file using the command line tool.

I have now added a “Get Web File” task:

This allows you to download a file from a web site, or save the contents of a page or head request.

This was easily done using script, but a few people asked for a specific task as they didnt know how to program script … I guess the user base of BuildIT is expanding to non-programmers which is great, as it really is a useful tool for anyone and everyone, anyhow I will probably look to include more tasks that were easy to do in script but should have a GUI for instead.

I have added to the GUI interface, the ability to specify a Proxy Server, a port number and the Passive Mode to an FTP Task.

The script object already had an FTPConnect method with these options but you could not set them on the GUI. This has now been changed.

As requested, I have now made BuildIT look more Windows XP with shadowed menus:

… and even customisable Toolbars:

At the moment, I am working on making the interface more ‘XP’ style and not the clunky Win95 look. This involves working on Toolbars and Menus. I am almost done, and when its tested I will post a new release.

In the meantime, I have been toying with a new idea and need feedback…

Should I make BuildIT MDI and have a workspace ability? The Workspace, I think, would be quite cool because you could add all your buildit project files to a workspace manager view on the left and group buildit files into folders and sub-folders. From this view you can double-click to edit a specific BuildIT project.

In my view, its quite nice to be able to ‘manage’ your projects like that but it doesnt have much use otherwise. I quite like the SDI multi-instance BuildIT, its so much easier and you can see many on-screen at the same time.

So, feedback would be cool, e-mail me.

A new build is available that adds a couple of minor features and fixes:

I have now added the ability to suppress the log output for a task:

This is useful for things like clean-up operations that you don’t specifically care about in your log, and so the important log items stand out more.

I have made a small improvement to the File Management task that should be quite beneficial in a lot of cases, and that is file date checking.

What this means, is that you can decide if your file(s) should be copied/moved/deleted only if the file date is less than or greater than a specified number of units.

You can perform the check on the File Creation, File Last Accessed or File Last Modified dates, and the units you can select are Minutes, Days, Hours, Months (rounded off to 30 days in a month), Years (365 days). This should give all the flexibility that is needed to do most of the checking.

This is great for things like backups, where you might only want to copy backup files more than 3 days old.