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Hi everyone Sayed here. I recently had a customer, Johan, contact me to help with some challenges regarding deployment automation. He had some very specific requirements, but he was able to automate the entire process. He has been kind enough to agree to write up his experience to share with everyone. His story is below. If you have any comments please let us know. I will pass them to Johan. I’d like to thank Johan for his willingness to write this up and share it. FYI if you’d like me to help you in your projects I will certainly do my best, but if you are willing to share your story like Johan it will motivate me more :) – Sayed   Folder deployment scenarios with the MsDeploy command line utility We have an Umbraco CMS web site where...

On June 6 th we released Windows Azure Web Sites, which is a rock solid and scalable way to host your .NET, PHP or Node.js websites. You can deploy to Azure Web Sites using Git. You can learn about that and many other Windows Azure Web Site features in this introductory video that I recently did for our Windows Server 2012 launch event . When you set-up Git publishing in Azure we create backend Git repo using our OSS project Kudu . You can then use this repos’ Git URL to happily git push azure master . Needless to say this option is still available to you. In addition, today we are taking the Git deployment features to the next level by enabling direct service integrations with CodePlex and Github. Many customers have been asking that instead...

Today I saw the following question on StackOverflow MSDeploy - Deploying Contents of a Folder to a Remote IIS Server and decided to write this post to answer the question. Web Deploy (aka MSDeploy) uses a provider model and there are a good number of providers available out of the box. To give you an example of some of the providers; when syncing an IIS web application you will use iisApp, for an MSDeploy package you will use package, for a web server webServer, etc. If you want to sync a local folder to a remote IIS path then you can use the contentPath provider. You can also use this provider to sync a folder from one website to another website. The general idea of what we want to do in this case is to sync a folder from your PC to your IIS...

When we released VS2010 we add support for web.config (XDT) transforms during publish/package. Note: From now on I’ll only use the word publish from now on but the full content relates to packaging as well. In the original implementation when you published your web project the web.config file would be transformed by the file web.{Configuration}.config, where {Configuration} is the project build configuration. For example Debug, or Release. If you publish on Release and there exists a web.release.config we will take your web.config and transform it with web.release.config before publishing. Cascading web.config transformations In VS 2012 ( as well as the publishing updates for VS2010 through the Azure SDK ) now support the concept of publish...

Within the web publishing tools in Visual Studio there are a few places where we point to more resources. For example if you open a VS publish profile (.pubxml) file you will see a link in the comments pointing to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=208121 . Note: you can find the VS publish profiles in your web project under Properties\PublishProfiles or My Project\PublishProfiles This is an “FWLink” and we can set the destination URL to whatever value we want. In this case the FWLink points to How to: Edit Deployment Settings in Publish Profile (.pubxml) Files and the .wpp.targets File in Visual Studio Web Projects . In some cases the FWLink ends up pointing to a blog post instead of a formal doc page. I will point a few FWLinks to the...

When building Visual Studio 2012 we made an effort to reduce the amount of menu options which are shown on toolbars as well as context menus. If you have used any of the pre-release versions of VS 2012 then you might have noticed that the Build Deployment Package and Package/Publish Settings context menu options are gone from Web Application Project. In VS2010 when creating a Web Deploy package the publish dialog was not used because there were no relevant settings. Now that we have enabled features like integration to enable Entity Framework Code First migrations, incremental database updates (coming in the final release), connection string updates, etc. we needed to find a way that you could leverage these great features when creating Web...

Last week we rolled out some updates for our Visual Studio 2010 Web Publishing Experience. This post will give you an overview of the new features which we released. In the coming weeks there will be more posts getting into more details regarding individual features. You can get these updates in the Windows Azure SDK for Visual Studio 2010 . When you download that package there you will also get the latest tools for Azure development. The new high level features include the following. Updated Web Publish dialog Support to import publish profiles ( .publishSettings files ) Support to configure EF Code First migrations during publish Support to create web packages in the publish dialog Publish profiles now a part of the project and stored in version...

We have two sets of ASP.NET providers which currently exist; the ASP.NET SQL providers , and the ASP.NET Universal Providers . In VS 2010 the SQL providers were in only providers used for our project templates. In VS 2012 we have switched to using the Universal Providers. One of the drawbacks of the SQL providers is that it leverages DB objects of SQL server which are not available in SQL Azure. In our updated web publish experience we have an Update Database checkbox which can be used to incrementally publish the database to the destination database. In this case if the source connection string is used by the ASP.NET SQL providers and you are publishing to SQL Azure then you will see the following message on the dialog. Note: you may see the...

In Visual Studio 2010 we introduced a database publishing experience in the Package/Publish SQL (PP/SQL) properties page. This support relies on generating create scripts from the source database and then executing those scripts when you publish your web application. For more details regarding this feature take a look at Package/Publish SQL Tab, Project Properties . One of the negative aspects of the implementation that we have there is that the DB schema publishing is not incremental, it always executes create scripts. So in many cases you publish your app for the first time and things are great, but the next time you try to publish you receive errors because it tries to create DB objects which already exist. In our improved publish dialog...

  The IIS Web Deployment Tool (Web Deploy) and the deployment features introduced in Visual Studio 2010 enable you to automate many deployment tasks, but we have heard you all that many common scenarios not yet documented fully. We are addressing this need by creating step-by-step walkthroughs that will guide you from beginning to end through scenarios that address common real-world needs. Interestingly, this blog post is not the documentation of the solution but actual documentation of problem statements. This post presents the first set of scenarios that we have identified and solicit your feedback to help us determine they are representative enough or not.  If you have any feedback as usual you can post them here as comments or...