David Truxall

I posted my slide deck from my talk (The Demise of Xcopy Deployment) at the terrific Ann Arbor Day of .Net 2010 on SlideShare. Thanks to everyone who attended both my talk and the event. A special thanks to the event organizers for doing a great job.

Blogs

The Microsoft Web Deployment Team Blog on IIS.net

Owais Shaikh’s Blog on IIS.net

Kristina Olson’s Blog

James Cook’s Blog

Kateryna Rohonyan’s Blog

Articles

How does Web Deployment with VS10 and MSDeploy Work?

Web Packaging: Creating web packages using MSBuild

Web Packaging: Installing Web Packages using Command Line

SQLCMD scripts in Web Deploy (MSDeploy) v1.1

ASP.NET Deployment Content Map

Visual Web Developer Team Blog

MS Deploy Basics

How To Use MSDeploy to Migrate Global Assembly Cache

How We Practice Continuous Integration And Deployment With MSDeploy

Getting MSDeploy working on our build/integration server

Using MSDeploy as a build task in TFS

It’s not enough to just install MSDeploy on a server to allow Visual Studio 2010 to connect to the server. If you don’t follow the steps below, you will probably get 403 errors when trying to connect.

1. When adding the Web Server (IIS) role, be sure to install Management Service.
2. In the Services snap-in, find the Web Management Service and set its startup to Automatic (it’s manual by default). Don’t start it yet.
3. Open the Internet Information Services Manager, and select the server.
4. Open the Management Service feature.
5. Check Enable Remote Connections.
6. Choose a port (or keep the default), IP, Certificate, choose any restrictions you might require.
7. In the Actions part of the right pane, click Apply.
8. Click the Start link in the right pane.

Now IIS is configured to accept incoming connections. Open a port on the firewall for the port (8172 by default) you selected in step 6 above.

Install MSDeploy. Make sure you start the Web Deployment Service after the install, and set the service startup to Automatic.

Now you can use the Publish feature of Visual Studio 2010 to push directly to your development server.

I’ll be speaking at the Ann Arbor Day of .Net on Saturday, May 1st, 2010. It’s being held at Washtenaw Community College. Register for the event at http://www.dayofdotnet.org/AnnArbor/Spring2010/Registration.aspx 

Here’s the abstract for my talk:

The Demise of Xcopy Deployment

One of the great features of .Net when it first released was Xcopy deployment. No more .dll registrations, just copy the files to the web server. While this was a great feature for Microsoft developers, new problems emerged, specifically around managing web.config. Sections like connection strings and custom errors need to be managed between environments, which meant many copies of the files or scripts to change them. Other necessary steps, like managing permissions and IIS configuration were still outside the Xcopy process. A recent tool, MSDeploy, is now integrated into Visual Studio 2010 and makes managing these issues easier. Besides web.config, MSDeploy also manages file deployments and synchronization, ACLs, and IIS settings. If your deployments have multiple steps, need ReadMe files, or can’t be done by someone outside your team, you need to learn MSDeploy!