Over the last few months I’ve seen several questions regarding setting WebDeploy parameterization values when deploying via MSBuild using the MSDeployPublish and related targets. These targets are used when publishing via Visual Studio or can be triggered by setting the MSBuild properties DeployOnBuild equal to “true” and DeployOnTarget to “MSDeployPublish”. The typical scenario is the …
Microsoft and the Visual Studio team have made it very easy to deploy an ASP.NET web application. So easy that few take the time to look beyond its capabilities until absolutely necessary. MSBuild initiates WebDeploy through right click Publish functionality in Visual Studio, deployment via TFS or when you manually execute the “Package” target to …
I had the incredible opportunity to attend BUILD 2016 this year. Actually EBSCO sent four of us and we learned a lot! There were so many good keynotes and sessions. The great part is even if you couldn’t attend in person, every keynote/session was live streamed on Channel9 and now all the recordings are available. …
BUILD 2016 Recap & Highlights for ASP.NET Developers Read More »
A common mistake I see (and often still make myself) is publishing the parameterization files with your web application. Visual Studio marks the file’s Build Action property to Content by default when you add a new XML file. This means it will be deployed in your application just like any other HTML file would be. …
WebDeploy Parameterization Tip: Dont publish your Parameterization Files Read More »
I saw a question on Twitter about using the new Release Management functionality in VSTS to deploy virtual applications to Azure websites. After some research I found the Azure Web App Deployment task uses the Publish-AzureWebSiteProject PowerShell cmdlet which does not support deployment of virtual applications. This is also confirmed by this issue on the …
VSTS Release: Custom Deploy Task to Deploy Virtual Applications to Azure Read More »
By default WebDeploy/MSDeploy will clear the target before deploying the new files. In most cases this is preferred it will help to avoid “works on my machine” issues and generally to keep all your environments more similiar. You can instruct WebDeploy to not delete existing files on the server from MSBuild using the following MSBuild …
WebDeploy/MSDeploy Quick Tip: Keep existing files during deployment Read More »
By default WebDeploy parameterizes all the ConnectionStrings in the web.config for a project. This always confuses developers when they are first converting over to parameterization from config transforms. You can open the resulting MSDeploy package zip file and the parameters.xml file to find parameter entries for each of your connections string with the name: [connection …
WebDeploy Parameterization Tip: Disable automatic ConnectionString parameterization Read More »
I have had the incredible opportunity to work with Microsoft employees and contractors over the last 8 weeks on an evaluation of Release Management (RA) vNext and attend the 2015 Connect() conference in New York. So I wanted to share some of my opinions on VSTS, RA and Microsoft direction for other’s benefit. Background We …
From time to time a developer will ask for help with Parameterization where they just can’t seem to get it working for some specific scenario. Often this is just an XPath bug or fat finger issue. In two seperate instances now simply deleting the existing parameter node in the parameters.xml and recreating it solves the …
These days one of the things I focus on most is the feedback loop for the teams I work with and support. In the past we just lived with the fact some code couldn’t be tested or tested easily and would waste untold hours in all the ceremony of deploying it out to a server …