Mike Vincent's Blog

Building a Custom Build Workflow with Deployment

Exploring Team Build based on Workflow 4.0 in Visual Studio 2010 ALM

With Visual Studio 2010 Application Lifecycle Management, Team Build is based on Workflow 4.0. Workflow provides an improved build experience and allows you to customize the workflow to suit your specific automation needs. Out of the "box" the default build workflow does not include deployment. Here I will show you how to add a simple deployment to a user acceptance test (UAT) location.

To begin, in the Team Explorer for your subject team project right click on Builds and select New Build Definition. Give the new build definition a name and supply the necessary information for the other tab pages. For Process, we are deriving our new process template from the default template. I'll give you a link to my custom process template at the end of this post and you can optionally specify that if you choose to.

Your new process template will be saved on the TFS server. I'm using the default storage location. Double-click on the file name to check it out from source control and open it. The file will open in the Workflow XAML designer. Be patient as it takes a while for everything to load.

The workflow will open in compressed or collapsed mode. I have opened the "Run on Agent" activity here. We will focus on the "Try Compile, Test, and Associate Changesets and Work Items" activity since that is where we want to add our deployment. If you are new to workflow based builds, spend some time exploring the tools and the template process workflow in order to understand what happens when and under what conditions.

In the "Try Compile, Test, and Associate Changesets and Work Items" activity, expand the Finally block. I have added a new activity at the end called "If DropBuild Successful". Expand the activity.

Note the condition. When it resolves to true, the Then block will execute. I've added an activity of type Sequence called "DeployUAT" that contains our actual deployment functionality. Since we only want to deploy to our UAT manually, I have added an Invoke for Reason activity and named it "InvokeOnlyForManual". You should see the dropdown for Reason set to 'Manual" in the properties.

I have scoped new variables and arguments to the "DeployUAT" activity. These allow us to define where our UAT site is located and what it's name is. Click on the Variables and Arguments tabs at the bottom of the designer.

While on the Arguments tab, open Metadata. Here I have defined a new category that will show up in the build process dialog. I have named this category "Deployment" and it displays our 2 new parameters with their default values.

Now to move on to the actual  work of deployment. First we need to stop the UAT web site. I do this in an InvokeProcess activity I have named "InvokeStopWebsite" that calls appcmd.exe and passes the argument "String.Format("stop site {0}", UATWebsiteName)" to stop the site as a VB expression.

Next, I need to delete existing content from the UAT site. I do this with an InvokeProcess activity that I named "InvokeDeleteWebsiteFiles" where I call cmd.exe and pass the argument "/c del *.* /s /q" to delete all files. Be careful when testing destructive operations during development to be sure you are executing against the intended target.

I then copy our newly built content to the UAT site with another InvokeProcess activity I named "InvokeCopyWebsiteFilesFrom".  Again I call cmd.exe and pass the argument "/c xcopy ""{0}/_PublishedWebsites/Tailspin.web"" {1} /s /e, BuildDetail.DropLocation, UATDirectory)" to xcopy the files from the drop location to our UAT site.

Finally, I restart the UAT web site with the InvokeProcess activity named "InvokeStartWebsite". I call appcmd.exe and pass the argument "String.Format("start site {0}", UATWebsiteName)" to start the site.

That concludes our simple deployment customization. Save your XAML file and check it in to source control. You now have your custom template ready for use. Below you can see our Deployment category that we added to the template process. The default values can be over-ridden when the process is manually called.

This custom example should get you started on adding deployment to your builds. There are many more considerations you may have to make for your particular implementations. Considerations include, security and crossing firewall boundaries. You may need a much higher degree of sophistication and may need to consider coding custom activities. Here's a summary in increasing order of complexity.

Download Custom Process Template 1

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