Deployment Best Practices

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Guest

Does anyone have suggesstions for ASP.NET deployment best practices. This is
in the context of a large organization where developers do not have admin
access to web servers. The idea of buliding msi packages for each deploy
seems difficult to implement because the server admins do not have the time
to constantly be running msi's and moving applications between environments.
Are there any proven products that can automate this process for .net
applications?
 
What about having some sort of folder structure in VSS (or whatever source
control you are using), that mimics the deployed structure. Then a build is
just doing a get latest of what's in there.
 
sstevens said:
Does anyone have suggesstions for ASP.NET deployment best practices. This
is
in the context of a large organization where developers do not have admin
access to web servers. The idea of buliding msi packages for each deploy
seems difficult to implement because the server admins do not have the
time
to constantly be running msi's and moving applications between
environments.
Are there any proven products that can automate this process for .net
applications?
Click to expand...

I know this response is late, but I was intrigued by your question.

You said that the system admins don't have time to be running msi's. Don't
they do installs all the time? Also, if you have an msi, can't it be run
unattended?

Of course, a better issue is that web setup projects can only install to the
default web site on a machine...

What I have done in a lower-volume production environment is:

0) Create a virtual directory on a web server accessible from the build
machine
1) Empty the VD
2) the Copy Project feature of VS.NET to copy only the "files necessary for
this project" to the VD
2a) If the VD is on a staging server, test here
3) On acceptance, have the VD copied up to a new directory in production. If
you use versioning, name the new directory to include the version,
otherwise, to include a timestamp.
0a) Production has two versions for each web application. The real one, and
the "next" one.
4) Configure IIS to point the "next" application to the newly-copied
directory.
5) Do final sanity checking
6) Configure IIS to point the "real" application to the newly-copied
directory

This worked well for a moderate volume of deployments.

John Saunders
(e-mail address removed)
 
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