Accelerating Custom Tools

The DevTools Solution enables you to add acceleration and distribution support for other tools and processes used in the development environment.

Some common tasks that Incredibuild distributes in a Make-based build are based on the GCC compiler and the other compilers Incredibuild supports out-of-the-box. However, some projects have very time-consuming custom tools that are executed as part of the build, such as rendering, encoding, compression, and custom compilers. You can extend Incredibuild's functionality to also distribute these tasks by adding a configuration file that tells Incredibuild which tools you'd like it to distribute to idle cores across your network. 

Support can be extended to additional tools, by adding /Profile to the BuildConsole command. 

For example, if you have a Make application, which includes compression of files and encoding to audio files, you can accelerate or distribute parts of the audio encoding and/or compression, by adding profile.xml to the buildconsole command, and in profile.xml, define the tools to accelerate. This is the done the same as in Visual Studio 2010 and later.

To add support for other tools using a profile XML file:

  1. Create a profile XML file.

  2. In the profile XML file, define the tools that you want BuildConsole /command to accelerate and distribute.

  3. Add the /profile option to your BuildConsole command line:

    BuildConsole /command="<job command line>" [Options] /profile="Profile.XML"

Note: This command line provides additional distribution and configuration instructions, as defined in the profile XML file.