Hi Simon,
There are no new ways that I know of since I wrote this post.
Though, I don’t understand your question completely.
Does your build take a while, or does the configuration take a while?
Depending on the size and number of files in your artifacts, zipping might not be the best solution. There are other factors regarding build artifacts that heavily influence build times, like network bandwidth between the Server and the Build Agents.
In general I try to reduce the build artifacts to an absolute minimum. If different dependent builds require different artifacts I usually create a zip file for each dependent build, unless most of the artifacts are shared.
When we moved our complete build infrastructure to Microsoft Azure I noticed another improvement in build times (exact same configuration) due to faster network traffic.
Hope this helps, otherwise I’m happy to answer your more specific questions here.
Regards,
Philipp