Question

I have a website project, and an outlook addin that communicates via a webservice to the same database. I’d like to add the outlook addin as “downloadable file” to the interface of the website.

How to achieve that at build time the outlook addin installer ends up in the website’s “Download” folder?

Is that possible?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I am not sure this is really a good idea, because maybe not every time you build it it is ok to upload it (broken builds? untested bugs?), but anyway, the idea might be this:

• find a way to mount the FTP site mounted as disk Z in the computer and keep it there
• you probably want to zip it before, so find and install a command line zip.exe
• find a way to have an automated job start every few minutes (like a batch file)

The job (might be a batch file) should do this:

• check the file creation date of C:\build\folder\executable.exe and compare it with the file creation date of Z:\download\folder\executable.zip
• only if newer, zip C:\build\folder\executable.exe to C:\build\folder\executable.zip and copy C:\build\folder\executable.zip to Z:\download\folder\executable.zip

In what language you write the script is your choice, a windows batch could do (the XCOPY command can copy only newer files), I know PHP and probably would use that with a batch file calling “php my_php_task.php”, but you can launch any language interpreter you like.

UPDATE

For zipping you can download this:
http://www.info-zip.org/Zip.html

For copying only newer files u can use XCOPY with options /D (newer only) and /Y (confirm overwriting). Other options here:
http://www.computerhope.com/xcopyhlp.htm

So the batch file might look just similar to these two lines:

zip -f C:\build\folder\executable.zip C:\build\folder\executable.exe
xcopy /D /Y C:\build\folder\executable.zip Z:\download\folder\executable.zip

Have it called every 30 seconds and the job is done. The -f option in zip and /D option in xcopy make sure the script does nothing except check creation dates if you have not recently rebuilt the file.