Re: ASP.NET deployment tools

We use a homegrown PowerShell remoting script which can be characterized similarly for some things (triggered by the CI system). If you've got other PS investments, that can make sense. From time to time, one ends up in deep forests of misery with http://connect.microsoft.com/PowerShell/feedback/details/587165/powershell-double-redirection-problem but they've kindly agreed to fix that for V3.

The client side is an invocation of a script that you xcopy deployed, along with it's inputs.

The agent install is then just:
winrm quickconfig

See http://www.pavleck.net/powershell-cookbook/ch29.html

If it had existed, I'd have assessed Octopusdeploy.com (it's a bit V1 but it's making all the right noises). But it does have an agent.

While the docs are a major pain, and there's a lack of polish, Web Deploy (MSDeploy and the tooling in VS2010) can also do a job if you're doing straightforward websites.

But then you knew most of that. I'm hoping this can provoke someone into giving a better answer!

--Ruben Bartelink / bartelink.com

--- In [email protected], "George V. Reilly" <george@...> wrote:
>
> We're using a home-grown Rube Goldbergesque deployment system to push
> ASP.NET applications out to our Windows servers. It's really showing its
> age. When we had fewer users, we could deploy at almost any time of day.
> Now we're having to push deployments late into the evening when the load is
> low. If there's a problem, we often have to rollback and try again another
> day.
> 
> For our Python web services, we're using some tools that we built on top of
> Puppet and MCollective to deploy to Linux servers, which works well. As far
> as I can tell (but I haven't looked closely), Puppet/MCollective doesn't
> have what we need on Windows.
> 
> Our current tool pushes a zip file to each Windows box. The agent on the
> box unzips it into a folder with a versioned name, updates the IIS virtual
> directory, pulls config into AppSettings.config, probably does some other
> stuff that I forget, restarts the ASP.NET application, and then notifies
> the central dispatcher. Only when all boxes have signaled success is a
> deployment considered complete. Sometimes it can take up to half an hour
> before the deployment is complete. A rollback is little more than modifying
> the IIS vdir to point to an older folder.
> 
> What are people using to deploy ASP.NET applications to production servers?
> We're using Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0, but we'd upgrade if we found a
> significantly better deployment system that required a more recent version.
> -- 
> /George V. Reilly  george@...  Twitter: @georgevreilly
> http://www.georgevreilly.com/blog  http://blogs.cozi.com/tech
>