IncrediBuild 9.3.5

Version Highlights

• This version of IncrediBuild provides experimental support for Visual Studio 2019.

FreeDev

• Fixed an issue where some of the FreeDev agents would become “Expired” prior to the allowed 30-day limit.

Visual Studio

• IncrediBuild’s predictive execution for optimized compilation performance certifies MSBuild version up to:
  • 15.9.20.62856 for Visual Studio 2017;
  • 16.0.218.25180 for Visual Studio 2019 Preview.
• Fixed a rare scenario when building an Xbox project within Visual Studio could produce the following error:
  error MSB6003: The specified task executable “X” could not be run. The process cannot access the file ‘Y’ because it is being used by another process”.
• Fixed an issue that would cause the /vsversion=vc15 switch to be ignored when only VS 2017 Build Tools are installed.

Miscellaneous

• Added a warning when the /profile command line switch points to a profile that cannot be found.

Antiviruses

• Stability fixes for issues that could occur when using IncrediBuild on machines with “Avecto Privilege Guard” and “Trend Micro” Security software.

Version Highlights

This version of IncrediBuild certifies Visual Studio version 15.8.2

IncrediBuild’s predictive execution for optimized compilation performance certifies MSBuild version up to 15.8.168.64424

Improved support for distributing DirectX-related processes to remote machines

In this version of IncrediBuild, we’ve enhanced the IncrediBuild virtualization engine to cover many various aspects of the ability to remotely execute processes that are using DirectX. Many IncrediBuild users are highly accelerating home-grown and commercial graphic-related executions using the various IncrediBuild integration options.

Accelerate VSTest unit test executions (Beta)

This version of IncrediBuild introduces a beta feature for users with time-consuming VSTest executions, which allows to distribute and highly accelerate VSTest executions.

At this stage, only command-line VSTest executions are supported. For assistance executing your VSTests using continuous integration tools or through the command line, please contact us at support@incredibuild.com and we’ll be glad to help you with accelerating your test cycles.

Learn how NCR and ModuleWorks achieved better productivity and faster time-to-market by accelerating their test cycles with IncrediBuild.

Windows Core OS (Experimental)

Improved support for IncrediBuild Agents running within Windows Core OS hosts

Windows Docker Containers (Experimental)

Various fixes related to working with IncrediBuild within Windows Docker Containers

IncrediBuild Enterprise Edition

• IncrediBuild extension for TeamCity (Experimental)

If you are using TeamCity for your continuous integration, we have some good news for you. With this new IncrediBuild extension for TeamCity, users can create and execute IncrediBuild build steps seamlessly from within TeamCity using a convenient standard TeamCity UX.

• Added an option to manually reset a “Single-Use Virtual Machine” image in scenarios where users require to update the image from which they provision their VMs. The “Single-Use Virtual Machine Image” featureallows users to provision and de-provision virtual machines from an image. An IncrediBuild license allocated to these VMs will automatically be released by IncrediBuild back to the license pool once the VM is destroyed.
• Various improvements to the IncrediBuild extension for Jenkins.
• Various improvements and fixes to the IncrediBuild Enterprise Dashboard

Visual Studio & MSBuild

• Improved performance for Cuda compilations and possibly other compilers in scenarios where the /e compiler switch (pre-processing) is being used as part of the compilation tasks.

IncrediBuild’s predictive execution considers compilation tasks with the /e flag as blocking other dependent tasks from being executed in a predictive, parallel manner. This may result in sequential execution of Cuda compilation tasks (which is the default behavior in Visual Studio). With this new feature, users can experiment whether performance can be improved by forcing the IncrediBuild predictive execution to operate in these scenarios. In order to achieve this behavior, a registry value should be created on the Initiator machine:

Registry Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Xoreax\IncrediBuild\Builder

String Value: AllowPredictedInPreprocessCL

Set this registry string value to “1” to enable predicted for CL tasks with /E parameter

• The IncrediBuild build monitor was added to Visual Studio 2017 “View” menu option
• Fixed an issue that could have led users building Visual Studio solutions with IncrediBuild under a service account to receive an error message saying: “MS Visual Studio xx.x is not installed on this computer” (usually in continuous integration tools such as Jenkins and others)
• Fixed an issue that could have led IncrediBuild to omit the 1>, 2>, prefixes in Visual Studio and MSBuild output
• Fixed some rare scenarios in which build success status wasn’t reported correctly
• Various bug fixes

Miscellaneous

• Fixed a rare scenario in which some Agents could become offline for short periods of time in very large IncrediBuild deployments
• Various UX fixes and improvements

This version of IncrediBuild solves some issues specifically related to the offering of IncrediBuild FreeDev from within the Visual Studio setup experience.

This version of IncrediBuild certifies Visual Studio version 15.7.2.

IncrediBuild’s predictive execution for optimized compilation performance certifies MSBuild version up to 15.7.179.6572.

IncrediBuild now supports the ability to build inside Continuous integration and Continuous delivery environments compiling Visual Studio projects in scenarios where only the Visual Studio build tools are installed on the build machines and not the Visual Studio IDE.

IncrediBuild Console Exit Code

IncrediBuild Console (BuildConsole and IBConsole commands) now exit with the exit code returned by the tool IncrediBuild executed.

Exit codes indicating IncrediBuild internal errors are now user-selectable in order to avoid clashes with build tools’ own exit codes.

Windows Core OS (Experimental)

IncrediBuild can now be used inside Windows Core OS (WCOS) as Initiator Agents. IncrediBuild Agents can be installed in a Windows Core OS and participate as Initiators. The IncrediBuild Agents operating as Helpers function inside Windows Core OS is coming soon.

Windows Docker Containers (Experimental)

IncrediBuild can now be installed and used as an Initiator inside a Windows Docker container environment. This allows IncrediBuild users to use IncrediBuild as part of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery workflows that are working with Windows Docker containers.

In scenarios where the Docker containers are constantly provisioned and de-provisioned, it is recommended to use IncrediBuild Enterprise Edition’s feature that automatically allocates a license to the IncrediBuild Agent installed inside the Docker container and automatically releases the license back to the IncrediBuild license pool once the Docker container is deleted.

Additional information about this feature can be found at the following link: https://incredibuild.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/IN/pages/65538/Single-use+Virtual+Machine+Image.

In this version of IncrediBuild, Agents installed inside a Windows Docker container can only operate as Initiators and won’t operate as Helper instances.

The IncrediBuild Agent helper functionality, when installed inside a Docker container, is coming soon.

Critical fix for Windows 10 build 17040

Already introduced in IncrediBuild version 9.22., this is a fix for a critical issue introduced in Windows 10 build 17040.

The issue was caused by a newly introduced Windows API that prevented tasks from executing on Helper machines running Windows 10 build 17040 and later.

Visual Studio

• Users can now manually update the MSBuild version number that will be certified for IncrediBuild’s predictive execution for optimized compilation performance. For further information navigate to the following link: https://incredibuild.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/IUM/pages/39452740/Predictive+Execution+and+MSBuild+Versions.
• Added the ability to reopen the IncrediBuild build monitor within Visual Studio 2017 using the Visual Studio “View” menu.
• Fixed an issue that prevented IncrediBuild from compiling C# projects when the C++ workload wasn’t installed as part of the Visual Studio installation.
• Fixed an issue that could have led the IncrediBuild for Visual Studio plugin to fail with ".NET Framework Initialization Error".
• Fixed an issue that could cause IncrediBuild to fail with "c1xx: fatal error C1083: Cannot open source file: [file name]" when compiling xaml generated cpp
• Fixed an issue that could have led IncrediBuild to fail with: “cl : Command line error D8037 : cannot create temporary il file; clean temp directory of old il files”.
• Fixed a rare scenario that could have led IncrediBuild to mark the build’s status bar as succeeded, although the build failed.

Make and other Build Tools Solution

• The Android NDK build tools are now fully supported as part of the IncrediBuild for Make and Other Build Tools solution. With this version of IncrediBuild, the following processes will be distributed automatically to Helper machines: arm-linux-androideabi-g++, arm-linux-androideabi-gcc, x86_64-linux-android-g++, x86_64-linux-android-gcc, aarch64-linux-android-g++ and aarch64-linux-android-gcc.

• Certified support for Ruby version 2.4. Users can now accelerate Ruby builds by distributing Ruby compilations to remote machines using the IncrediBuild DevTools interface.
• Certified support for the latest Xilinx compiler - arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++.exe

Miscellaneous

• Fixed an Issue in the IncrediBuild integration with the Nintendo Switch platform that could have led IncrediBuild to build unnecessary files in a specific scenario.
• The IncrediBuild Coordinator Monitor and the XLicProc command for loading a license through the command line now support elevated privileges.
• Fixed an issue related to OfficeScan antivirus, which could have led IncrediBuild to fail with "Failed to load build set" on machines with this antivirus installed.
• Fixed an issue that could have led IncrediBuild to fail with “ERROR: INSERT has more expressions than target columns” on operating systems with a few specific locales.
• The build status bar will now be colored white for builds that were canceled by users instead of yellow. The yellow color will be used only for builds that produced warnings.
• Fixed a rare scenario that could have led IncrediBuild to fail with “THandleIntegerMap_HashTable: Hashtable does not allow duplicates”.
• Fixed a rare scenario to could have led Agents to disconnect from the IncrediBuild Coordinator.

IncrediBuild 9.2.2

Version Highlights

This version of IncrediBuild addresses a critical issue introduced in Windows 10 build 17046.
The issue was caused by a newly introduced Windows API that prevented tasks from executing on Helper machines running Windows 10 build 17046 and later.

Fixed an issue where build error output messages were not sent to the console when the Predictive Execution feature was used. This issue affected continuous integration environments that only have Visual Studio Build Tools installed and not the entire IDE.

Visual Studio

Fixed an issue that could have caused IncrediBuild to unnecessarily rebuild a Visual Studio solution that uses the Clang compiler when the predictive execution optimization feature was being used (such as for Android NDK, Nintendo Switch and more).

Fixed an issue when executing concurrent IncrediBuild builds that could have led to a failure: “Cannot create file: …\DependencyCache.dat”.

Fixed a rare scenario that could have led IncrediBuild to fail with command line error D8003

Fixed an issue in which IncrediBuild marked a Visual Studio build as failed when an XCopy task returned an expected non-zero exit code.

Make and other Build Tools Solution

Added support for the cl6 compiler as part of the Make and other Build Tools solution

Fixed a rare error condition when using BSCMake.

Miscellaneous

IncrediBuild offers a performance enhancement switch that allows Helpers to directly access UNC paths instead of accessing the UNC paths through the Initiator host. This feature is now supported in mixed OS environments.

Fixed a problem preventing IncrediBuild from distributing tasks to Helper machines with Tencent Anti-Phishing software installed.

IncrediBuild 9.2.1

We are happy to announce the availability of IncrediBuild Enterprise Edition. This new product introduces some advanced features that cater to enterprise organizations’ unique needs, going even beyond software acceleration.

IncrediBuild Enterprise Edition empowers users with a focus on manageability of large deployments, big data analytics and reporting. It allows for tighter integration with advanced dev technologies, enhanced support for continuous delivery and devops practices as well as addressing the unique requirements coming from IT and operations of enterprise companies.

For further information on IncrediBuild Enterprise Edition please refer to the IncrediBuild Enterprise Edition user manual.

General

This version of IncrediBuild is certified for all Windows operating systems with updates released up to the 7th of December 2017.

We've recently introduced a new extension for QTCreator. If you'd like to try it out, please contact us at support@incredibuild.com.

Known Issue

Please note that the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (FCU) 1709 contains a bug that causes CreateWindow() and CreateWindowEx() to fail unpredictably. This is a known issue which affects many Visual Studio extensions and was acknowledged by Microsoft. 

For more updates from Microsoft and possible future fixes, please follow this link: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4054150/issues-when-windows-10-fall-creators-update-calls-createwindowex-for-s.

This issue may cause the IncrediBuild extension for Visual Studio to crash intermittently.

Visual Studio

• This version of IncrediBuild is fully certified for Visual Studio 2017 update 5 (version 15.5) along with the MSBuild version which was released with the update.

• Upgrading IncrediBuild through the Visual Studio setup will now upgrade the IncrediBuild product as well as the IncrediBuild extension for Visual Studio.
• Better handling of scenarios when IncrediBuild compiles solutions that contains projects which compiles using the Visual Basic compiler.

Make and Other Build Tools

• A new IncrediBuild extension for QTCreator is available. If you'd like to try it out, please contact us at support@incredibuild.com.
• The Arm compiler "arm-xilinx-linux-gnueabi-g++" is now supported by default as part of the IncrediBuild for Make & Build Tools solution.
• IncrediBuild will now make the jom build system better parallelize processes by default when executed using the IncrediBuild for Make & Build Tools solution

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that was introduced in version 9.0 when executing an MSBuild compilation using "buildconsole /command" that could result in IncrediBuild returning "xgTaskID=00000000" in the stderr stream of a compilation task which could potentially cause the compilation to fail.
• Various minor bug fixes.

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Visual Studio

This version of IncrediBuild fully certifies Visual Studio 2017 update 3 along with the MSBuild version which was released with the Visual Studio 2017 update 3 version.

There are currently two known issues related to Visual Studio 2017 update 3: 

1. Supporting the Visual Studio "Lightweight solution loading" feature is yet under development and currently not supported.
2. Changes made to Visual Studio 2017 update 3 prevent IncrediBuild's Build Monitor -> Project View from showing the colored status of each project when compiling with this version of Visual Studio. We are working on fixing this issue in the next version of IncrediBuild.

As part of the IncrediBuild team’s effort of developing a new and optimized solution for highly accelerating C# code bases, we've added some improvements to our existing support for C# acceleration for solutions with more than 30 projects. In scenarios where multiple MSBuild solutions are executed in parallel, the new IncrediBuild feature for concurrent execution can provide a meaningful benefit for accelerating full C# build cycles.

As Nuget is gaining popularity, IncrediBuild is now capable of coping with scenarios where a build triggered from within Visual Studio is configured to restore missing Nuget packages. We are currently working on supporting this scenario as part of our out-of-the-box support for Visual Studio. In the current version, you'll be required to create a registry value in order for IncrediBuild to cope with this scenario. In order to achieve this behavior, on the Initiator machine, create a registry string value named AutoRestoreNugetPackages under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Xoreax\IncrediBuild\Builder and set its value to 1.

New Stuff

• IncrediBuild can now be used to accelerate builds executed by the popular QT Creator IDE. An IncrediBuild plugin for QT Creator is currently under development. For instructions on accelerating QT Creator builds, please contact us at support@incredibuild.com
• IncrediBuild can now highly accelerate your CTest executions. CTest is a testing tool distributed as part of CMake. If you are interested in accelerating your CTest executions please contact us at support@incredibuild.comfor further instructions.
• Users can now Change the IncrediBuild buildconsole's exit code by using "/IbExitCodeShift=<value>" command line switch.
• A new feature was added in IncrediBuild build monitor->progress view that allows users to search for a specific bar(s). Pressing “Ctrl+B” in the progress view areas will allow you to enter a text to be searched across the captions of the bars represented in the progress view. Once the "OK" button will be pressed, all the bars containing the search text will be highlighted and a text file will be created and opened in your default text editor program to show the list of tasks that apply to your searched text.

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• Users can now change the location to which IncrediBuild writes temporary data.

Game Consoles

Various fixes and improvements were made to Nintendo Switch compilation acceleration. In order to optimize the performance gain IncrediBuild offers for Nintendo Switch builds, make sure you set a high value to your "Max Compilations" field. This will instruct the Nintendo Switch build system to execute many concurrent compilation tasks which IncrediBuild will then distribute to remote Helpers. In order to set this value in Visual Studio, open the ject's property page-> "C/C++→General" and set the "Max Compilations" field to a large value (we recommend starting with a value higher than 100). 

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The latest development kit versions of XBox, Sony PlayStation, Nintendo, Unreal Engine and Lumberyard were certified with this new version of IncrediBuild.

Bug Fixes

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