As you will no doubt agree, it's handy as heck to be able to get a fresh installer for your app on demand. Right now our build is a relatively manual process that takes a number of hours to complete. It's inefficient and error prone. The answer - automation of course!I've already set up our environment so that it will automatically build our code whenever somebody checks in - this is a good thing. However, we're thinking about moving to the next step and getting our installer to be automatically built. We're not sure exactly how we're going to do this yet, but the components are:
- Our .NET solution (most of our code is here).
- Some VB 6 code (just enough here to have to make the build interesting).
- An InstallShield installer (and dealing with the InstallShield licensing nonsense).
- Create our own MSBuild setup with custom tasks. Getting this to happen on our build server would be ideal because then anyone on the team could make an installer through the TFS build interface.
- Write a .NET app from scratch. Not quite as slick as using MSBuild (considering MSBuild was sort of designed to do just this sort of thing), but I'll take whatever works.
- This deals with incorporating VB6 and MSBuild
- This has some links for creating custom build steps
- This is getting started with MSBuild
- This is some basic info for automating the TFS Version Control.
- Creating a label
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