Hi Roy, any idea of how the thing compares to Visual Builder (from Kynook), for which Mike Gunderloy also had quiet good comments recently? I'm very tempted in investing time in such a tool for my team. However, my concern is that with Team System being around, this might not be a good "strategical" choice. Or maybe one that I would have some difficulties to explain to my boss (who is just reading the brochures ... saying that VSTS already includes a set of build tools).
David: I've used both, and FB is much more usable. They both share the same basic capabilites, but you could say that Kinook's tool is somehow more "C++ oriented" that is, it's more of a barebones powerful scripting engine, with less investment on design and usability, while FB is much more "VB oriented" meaning that it's much more usable but still just as capable under the hood (more like VB.NET than VB6 in that way..)
If I had a choice I'd go with something which is proven to be worrkable - FB. It's pretty cheap to begin with, and one could always start using VSTS if they wanted too later. the other way around wouldn't work since the investment is too big.
Personally, I find FB (right now) more lightweight, plus it can be used to automate practically anything, not only build. I've used it to deploy whole applications, configure things, move stuff and basically any task that is just begging to be automated can be done with this. Team Build is (I believe) more targeted at "building stuff" rather than anything else. Plus, it does not have the cool design that FB has right now. Perhaps that'll change in the future, but for now, I have project to build, deploy and configure, and the fastest way there for me is FB.
Final Builder and Visual Build are both pretty good, but they cost money.
BuildIT from www.coderanger.com is free, simple, has a lot of the most common 'tasks' like emails, zipping, file management, ftp etc; but also has 2 generic tasks: run a program and script that allows you to perform most other functions required, I havent been able to find anything I havent been able to do so far from backing up mysql databases, to sending out email lists, from building/testing/deploying new versions of our consumer software.
Like the others, the author is receptive to changes, comments and suggestions and tries to send out new versions as often as he is able. He also has a blog, but he doesnt post that often, as he does new builds each time he makes a few changes ... although he did tell me that he does want to blog more often.
Its well worth looking at, not least for a comparison with more expensive alternatives.