More ProjectDistributor activity - auto updater and upcoming features
Jonathon de Halleux (aka: "Peli") has just published a neat little helper assembly written in Whidbey which uses the ProjectDistributor webservices and can help detect whether there is a new Release available for download for a given project.
You could use this assembly to provide a basis for rudimentary "auto-update" support for your apps. I know that Mitch has written a task which automagically uploads new builds into ProjectDistributor via the services. So, using ProjectDistributor as your release repository it's easy to see how you can extend it via the services interface to totally automate your build publishing.
As an aside, I added a couple of new features to the build which is running the online site:
- There's now a link to the webservices on the main menu
- There's a new webmethod named ListReleasesByProject
- There's a new webmethod named GetDownloadUrl (you should use this when displaying links to your downloads as I may choose to abstract the download service off to a 3rd party at a later date)
- I've fixed the comments section so that the comment subject and the name of the user that left the comment will now be displayed.
For the next release I'm planning to implement a more advanced Issue Tracking feature, Trackbacks, and I'm also tossing up whether to integrate Scott Mitchell's new skmFAQ API in to manage the FAQ's. At this stage it's more likely that the FAQ implementation will have to wait until I've got the Issue Tracking in there.