MSBuild your way to ZIP Deliveries – Using MSBuild and MSBuild Community Tasks to zip your Build

Ben Hall's Blog - Using MSBuild to create a deployment zip

“Automated builds are one of the core fundamental musts for software development. However, your build doesn't just have to build the solution and execute your unit tests. For IronEditor, my build also creates two zip files. One zip is the output from the build for archiving purposes, the second is my deployment zip - the zip which actually gets pushed up to CodePlex containing only the files required by the application. In this post, I will cover how you can get MSBuild to zip your build output.

To use zipping functionality within your build scripts, you need to use the MSBuild Community Tasks which is a great collection of MSBuild extensions and a must if you are using MSBuild.

…”

This is something I’d like to take a closer look at. Like Ben, I have some CodePlex projects were this could come in handy. Right now I manually zip my setup.exe/MSI and then upload it. It would be nice to automate some of that. Also it would be cool to also zip the source for the given build so that could be uploaded with the release (sure I check everything in, but having a zip with the release would be nice too).

 

Related Past Post XRef:
SolutionZipper - VS2005 Addin to Clean and Zip in One Step

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