What is disclosed is a method of building a software product in an integrated development environment using several build styles and a target. The method includes (1) determining an order of precedence for the build styles, where each of the build styles comprises a dictionary of build settings; and (2) building a software product by applying at least one of several build styles to the target based upon the order of precedence. In various embodiments of the invention, the build settings within the build styles are capable of referring to other build settings and concatenating new values with previously defined values.