Creating Releases without Visual Studio

If you want to create releases and installers without using the Visual Studio scripts which come with the NuGet packages, this is the article for you.

As I don't have a standalone way to create releases yet, the current packages ship with a Create-Release PowerShell script which you can invoke.

So you could have a simple script like this in source control, which you run after the code is compiled:

$solutionDir = "."                      # this is where my code lives
$buildOutputDir = ".\MyApp\bin\Release" # this is where the build output lives

. packages\Squirrel.0.6.17-beta\tools\Create-Release.ps1 ` 
       -SolutionDir $solutionDir `
       -BuildDir $buildOutputDir

Things that suck about this approach:

The script depends on a specific version

You can actually workaround that by just scanning for the script (yes, this will blow up if someone else has a package named "Create-Release" - you have been warned)

$solutionDir = "."                      # this is where my code lives
$buildOutputDir = ".\MyApp\bin\Release" # this is where the build output lives

$script =  Get-ChildItem "$solutionDir\packages\\" `
                -Filter "Create-Release.ps1" 
                -Recurse | Select-Object -first 1

. $script.FullName -SolutionDir $solutionDir -BuildDir $buildOutputDir

I want to specify a different Releases directory!

Now you can!

$solutionDir = "."                      # this is where my code lives
$buildOutputDir = ".\MyApp\bin\Release" # this is where the build output lives
$releasesDir = "..\..\Release"          # publish to a folder outside the repository

$script =  Get-ChildItem "$solutionDir\packages\\" `
                -Filter "Create-Release.ps1" 
                -Recurse | Select-Object -first 1

. $script.FullName -SolutionDir $solutionDir -BuildDir $buildOutputDir ` 
                   -ReleasesDir $releasesDir