Tim Robinson

I don't seem to be the first one to be having problems keeping track of his .NET binaries:

• OJ offered to build one :)
• John Mandia poined me towards several Java-based tools: Artifactory, Antill Pro and Nexus. Of these, Artifactory and Nexus are open source. Of course, Apache Maven is a fairly well-known Java packaging tool.
• James Webster showed me the Visual Studio Dependencies Manager, an addin for Visual Studio 2003.

Finally, Terry Spitz had some fairly enthusiastic feedback:

hell yes! we've got various vbscripts to do this. shouldn't it be 'easy' in say MSI (if too heavyweight), or powershell. additional points if it can handle multi-level caching, i.e. cross-region or internet code is cached on a team share as well as locally.

Windows Installer occurred to me when I started thinking about this. However, I think such a tool should be limited to deploying assemblies to a particular project's source tree -- deploying them via MSIs suggests putting them into a central location on each machine, and I predict that individual projects will start interfering with each other this way, particularly on a build server. On the other hand, Windows Installer does have the concept of merge modules: mini MSIs for software components that get merged into the final application installer.

Terry's multi-level caching idea is nice. There should definitely be local team and Internet repositories. Additionally, geographically distributed teams probably want local caches to keep overhead to a minimum. And I noticed that my Amazon-based web server cleverly goes to a special Ubuntu package repository hosted on S3, which keeps things quick and hopefully reduces my bandwidth costs.