Sharing products

About this task

Product sharing is the practice of letting developers share products that were built by the build manager. For example, Joe is working on the toolkit.exe executable. He has a working version of toolkit.exe because he is making changes to it. In the office next door, Mary is making changes to the guilib.lib library. Although the toolkit.exe executable is linking with the guilib.lib library, Joe is not making changes to guilib.lib and does not need a working version of it.

Joe can use the version of guilib.lib built by the build manager. After the integration testing project is built and passes testing, the build manager will create a baseline, which checks in copies of the prep products to make them available to developers. When Joe is ready to get Mary’s latest changes to guilib.lib, he will update his development project to bring in the latest tested product file.

Why is this something your site might want to use?

This process cuts the amount of extra work developers need to complete because they do not need to build products that they do not modify.

You can share products by packaging them into external projects (About external projects) that can be shared.


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