Here at InterKnowlogy we are always looking for ways to optimize our business. We’ve been using automated builds for sometime now. They are seriously one of the best things since sliced bread! Who doesn’t love to see a giant green checkmark stating their check-in succeeded. Or yelling names down the hallway when someone else causes a huge red ‘X’ to show up due to a failed check-in. As long as those names are aimed at you that is… We’ve been struggling with one problem lately with our release builds. If we have someone working offsite and they need to get the build after it completes they have to VPN into our network, go to the build directory, and copy the deliverable to their local machine. We do a lot of really cool graphically intense applications, which can mean large deliverables. This then turns into a really long difficult process to get a single deliverable. After a lot of discussions we come up with a really cool idea to use Hightail.

Hightail (Formerly YouSendIt)

We use Hightail for sending and receiving large files as I’m sure many of you do. We love the feature allowing us to specify an expiration date on a file so it will no longer take up space on our account. I did a lot of research on DropBox, Box, SkyDrive, and a few other options and each had pros and cons. In the end, Hightail was superior. It supports expiration dates, emails, and an easy API.

BuildSendService

We created a REST service that lives on our build server named the BuildSendService. This service is responsible for accepting a file path, expiration date, and details for sending the email with a link to the file. Information received is immediately added to a queue and which is then processed asynchronously. This allows the caller of the service to continue on to do more work instead of waiting for the file to be hightailed. The service asynchronously processes each item in the queue using the Hightail API, which is brain dead simple! It’s really great! Hightail takes care of the email for us once the file is uploaded. Recipients can then quickly download the file from their inbox! AWESOME!

SendBuild Custom Build Action

In order to leverage the BuildSendService most efficiently we built a Custom Build Action named SendBuild. In our Build Process Template, after the build has completed all other tasks and the final deliverable is ready for use in the final build directory, the SendBuild action contacts the BuildSendService to hightail the build to all desired recipients. It is not a mandatory action and is ignored if no recipients are specified. We wanted this action to be as fast as possible. That is why the BuildSendService accepts the parameters and queues the information immediately. This frees up our build server to process the next request immediately instead of waiting for a large deliverable to be uploaded to Hightail.

Conclusion

While this process is still new to us here at InterKnowlogy it is showing promise. Overtime, I’m sure we’ll tweak the current implementation to make it better and help use run more effectively and efficiently. Also, Hightail is just awesome! They have been super helpful answering all of our questions and pointing me in the right direction for development. They have a .NET sample application, which as far as I can tell implements each of their APIs. That was the best source of information. Their documentation is mostly good, but could use some extra explanations. If you want to do something similar for your build process let me know. I’m happy to help where I can.