In the previous recipes in this chapter, we built OpenJDK 7 for Windows using Windows SDK Version 7.1. This SDK requires installation prior to using it. The installation process requires .NET Framework 2 (to run the installer, included in Windows 7) and .NET Framework 4. Installation of these components may be very time consuming in some usage scenarios. For example, to automated builds it may be desirable to use completely clean Windows images for the builds. Besides being slow, the .NET Framework and SDK installers are graphical tools and may be hard to script for automatic installation.
In this recipe, we will create a set of files and an environment script that can be used to build OpenJDK 7 i586 and amd64 on completely clean Windows installations (with corresponding architecture) without installing any tools through GUI installers. Such a set of files may be put under the version control system to be checked out prior...