Real Incremental Build - Part 1 – Motivation for small deployment packages

You have deployed version x of your compiled application to your production environment.
Some bugs were resolved and you want to deploy a fix.

You have 2 options:

1. Deploy a full updated build of the application.
2. Deploy differential package only.

Now, Option 1 will clearly work.
You run your build, take everything from the drop location, and deploy it.

Pros:

• You're sure that you won't missed anything.
• All files are compatible with each other.

Cons:

• The package will have big size (lots of MB – depends on your application size)

At first, the size of the patch looks unimportant.

But if you take into account the time it will take to upload it to your production environment and distributed it between your hundreds of applications instances – this would be unwise not to consider this factor. Or if you let users to download this patch from your website – I guess you’ll want to minimize its size to save your bandwidth usage.

on the next parts we will go from this globally described scenario into more detailed one – based on Microsoft TFS (Team foundation server) source control & Team Build. We will try to show how to create a delta package contains only the new and updated binaries and files. We will meet some implantation problems – and hopefully overcome them.

See part 2.