Getting MSDeploy working on our build/integration server - Is an MSBuild upgrade necessary?
- by Jeff D
We have what I think is a fairly standard build process:
1. Developer: Check in code
2. Build: Polls repo, sees change, and kicks off build that:
3. Build: Updates from repo, Builds w/ MSBuild, Runs unit tests w/ nunit,
4. Build: creates installer package
Our security team allows us to pull from the build server, but does not allow the build server to push. So we generally rdp in, d/l the installers, and run them, which rules out the slick deployment services, so I would need to generate packages instead. I'd like to use MSDeploy, except that we have the following issues:
We're on .net 3.5, and the MSBuild target (Package) that uses MSDeploy requires 4.0. Is there anything I'd need to install other than .net 4.0 RC for this? (Would MSBuild be part of that upgrade?)
When I generate packages with MSDeploy, I see that I don't have just 1 file. There's a zip, deploy.cmd, SourceManifest.xml, and SetParameters.xml. What are all the other files for, and why wouldn't they all be in the 'package'?
It sounds as if you can create packages by telling the system to look at a working IIS site. But if the packages are build from a CI environment, aren't you basically out of luck here? It feels like they designed some of this for small-scale developers deploying from their dev environment. That's a fine use case, but I'm interested in see what everyone's enterprise-experience is with the tool
Any suggestions?
