Mike Vincent's Blog : Team Foundation Server, ALM

Using MSDeploy to Automate Web Deployment for Test and Production with Visual Studio ALM 2010 Team Build

mikev — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 18:58:00 GMT

Leverage MSDeploy.exe to Automatically Deploy Builds Where We Need Them

In an earlier posting Building a Custom Build Workflow with Deployment I showed how you can extend Team Build workflow to do a simple deployment to a user acceptance test (UAT) location. Here I'll discuss improving that example with the powerful capabilities of MSDeploy.exe. You can download the PowerPoint slide deck and Word document from my code camp and user group presentation for an overview and details of the MSDeploy.exe command line reference.

MSDeploy.exe is the engine behind Microsoft's Web Deployment tool. It assists in deployment, migration and synchronization of web applications and sites from one location to another. The locations can be local or remote, requiring a remote agent service. IIS must already be installed on the source and destination computers. MSDeploy has numerous features that let you, with a great degree of precision, include those components that you want to process and exclude those that you do not.

Synchronize
- Coordinates source and destination
- Locally or remotely
- High degree of precision including dependencies
Package
- package and archiveDir let you snapshot into .zip of archive directory
- Parameterization and manifest let you customize
Deploy
- Implement or test with whatif
- Computer to computer directly or use packages
- Features for troubleshooting

MSDeploy.exe Command Line

The Msdeploy.exe command-line executable file that implements Web Deploy functionality contains many powerful features. A Web Deploy verb specifies the action to be taken, such as synchronization (sync. The -source and -dest arguments define the source and destination of the data to be deployed. Typically, a source or destination is a Web site or Web server. A variety of predefined source and destination object types are available in the form of providers. Providers let you access and synchronize Web sites and Web servers, metabase and ApplicationHost.config configuration information, archived Web sites and Web servers, file and directory paths, and other IIS-related data. For more information about providers, see Web Deploy Providers.

Principal elements are a verb (also called an operation), a source, an optional destination, and optional operation settings

msdeploy.exe -verb:<verbName>
    -source:<provider>[=<pathToProviderObject>
            [,<providerSetting>=<providerSettingValue>]]
        [-dest:<provider>[=<pathToProviderObject>
            [,<providerSetting>=<providerSettingValue>]]]
        [-<MSDeployOperationSetting> ...]

Verbs are delete, dump, getDependencies, getSystemInfo, and sync

Web Deploy has additional arguments that let you refine the meaning of providers and their sources and destinations. Operation settings modify how the command runs. Rules modify the behavior of operations. Link extensions let you pull together data in ways that would not otherwise be possible. These features combine to enable you to implement custom Web deployment scenarios with maximum power and flexibility.

Using MSDeploy.exe in Team Build

If your destination is remote, you’ll need the Web Deploy remote service installed and running on the remote machine. Best practice is to check for dependencies before a sync operation with getDependencies and resolve conflicts and unsupported components. Backup the destination as appropriate, then create your command and test it. Note: use whatif first and check the output.

msdeploy -verb:sync -source: ,computerName= -dest: -whatif >msDeploySync.log

After you have verified it is doing what you want, you can run without the whatif. When it tests successfully you’re ready to move to implementing your deployment in Team Build workflow.

You can refer to my pervious post for creating a custom build and navigating the build workflow. In the "Try Compile, Test, and Associate Changesets and Work Items" activity, I expand the Finally block and added a new activity at the end called "If DropBuild Successful". Here I'm expanding 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. In my previous post example we had to do several individual steps in order to perform a clean deployment. With the power of msdeploy, we can do it all with one activity that I have named InvokeSyncWebsite.

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 example should get you started using msdeploy for deployment to your builds. There are many more considerations you may have to make for your particular implementations including, security, domain and firewall boundaries. We have just scratched the surface of msdeploy's capabilities.

Download Custom Process Template MSDeploy_

The Ultimate Event: Visual Studio 2010 & Team Foundation Server 2010

mikev — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:35:00 GMT

The Ultimate Event: Visual Studio 2010 & Team Foundation Server 2010

This event would be of interest to all that want to learn more about Visual Studio 2010 Application Lifecycle Management. I will be presenting at the San Diego and Los Angeles events and John Miller who helps run SoCal Team System will be presenting at the Irvine event.

Join me for a sneak peek of Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010, which will be a landmark release of the premier development toolset for Windows®, Web and Cloud development.

The Ultimate Event is your exclusive opportunity to hear about Visual Studio 2010 from experts before the product is launched this year. Microsoft has made significant investments to and improvements of Modeling and Testing/QA tools in Visual Studio 2010. At this event you’ll get a comprehensive overview of Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010, which is the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) core of Team System. We’ll present enhancements in version control, reporting, project management and build management.

Spend the day with us to learn how to take software development to the next level with Visual Studio 2010.

Event Agenda

Time	Topic
8:30 AM-9:00 AM	Registration, Welcome
9:00 AM-10:30 AM	Lap Around VS 2010
10:45 AM-12:00 PM	Agile Management with TFS
12:00 PM-12:30 PM	Lunch
12:30 PM-1:45 PM	No More “No Repro”
2:00 PM-3:15 PM	Architecture for Everyone

Hope to see you at one of these events.

Cheers,

Mike Vincent

Welcome Time
8:30 AM

Event Time
9:00 AM – 3:30 PM

Register for a date & location near you!

Click the appropriate registration link below OR call 1.877.673.8368 and reference the Event ID.

Date	Location	Event ID
3/2/10	Bellevue, WA	1032439179
3/2/10	San Diego, CA	1032439178
3/4/10	Los Angeles, CA	1032439180
3/9/10	Mountain View, CA	1032439176
3/9/10	Irvine, CA	1032439181
3/10/10	Phoenix, AZ	1032439183
3/11/10	Salt Lake City, UT	1032439996
3/11/10	Portland, OR	1032439182
3/16/10	Denver, CO	1032439184
3/16/10	San Francisco, CA	1032439177
3/18/10	Boise, ID	1032440741

Visual Studio 2010 ALM Pricing

mikev — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 13:51:00 GMT

I'm frequently asked pricing questions for Microsoft's Application Lifecycle Management products. As always, my response is check with your Microsoft sales representative for your specific case. Here's the suggested retail pricing. If you are renewing your MSDN Subscription, timing may be important so check it out soon.

Suggested Retail Pricing (USD) for Visual Studio 2010			With 1-Year MSDN Subscription*
Product	Buy	Upgrade	Buy	Renew
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate	-	-	$11,899	$3,799
Visual Studio 2010 Premium	-	-	$5,469	$2,299
Visual Studio 2010 Professional	$799	$549	$1,199	$799
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010	-	-	$2,169	$899
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010	$499	$399	-	-
Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 CAL	$499	-	-	-
Visual Studio Load Test Virtual User Pack 2010 (1000 Virtual Users)	$4,499	-	-	-

* Subscription contents vary by purchased product.

Announcing the launch of the Southern California Visual Studio Team System Users Group!

mikev — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:04:00 GMT

The SoCal Team System User Group will be launching on June 23. We'll be meeting in Irvine at QuickStart Intelligence 16815 Von Karman Avenue, Suite 100. Pizza and networking starts at 6:30 pm and the meeting starts at 7:00. If you are in the Southern California area, I hpoe you can join us. Please RSVP to mikev@mvasoftware.com if you plan to attend so we can be sure to have enough food and drink available.

SoCal Team System is a user group focused on software application lifecycle management. We provide a forum for learning about, exchanging ideas, and using Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. If you are new to VSTS, just checking it out, want to learn more, or an experienced user wanting to share your knowledge, please join us.

Visual Studio Team System provides multi-disciplined team members with an integrated set of tools for architecture, design, development, database development, testing and building of applications. Team members can continuously collaborate and utilize a complete set of tools and guidance at every step of the application life cycle.

Come learn about Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Best Practices with Team System author, Microsoft Regional Director and MVP Richard Hundhausen.

For more details visit the group's web site at http://www.socalteamsystem.org.

VSTS Web-Cast on SearchWinDevelopment.com

mikev — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 04:24:00 GMT

On May 20^th, Richard Hundhausen and I had the pleasure of recording a couple of web casts on Visual Studio Team System. My session focused on why VSTS is a good investment in today’s challenged economy and Rich focused on developing with VSTS. We had a great time with the TechTarget folks shooting the video. They should be on the http://SearchWinDevelopment.TechTarget.com site soon.

SoCal Rock & Roll Code Camp June 27 and 28, University of California San Diego

mikev — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 04:07:00 GMT

San Diego Code Camp is again coming up June 27 – 28 at US San Diego Extension. Always a great get-together, it again includes a Saturday evening dinner and rock-n-roll entertainment. As of today, there are 67 sessions registered. Check it out at http://www.socalcodecamp.com.

I’ll be presenting “A Lap Around Visual Studio 2010” and “Maximizing Your Investment With VSTS 2008” Hope to see you there.

MSDN Developer Conference VSTS Presentation

mikev — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 04:38:00 GMT

I really enjoyed the opportunity to present "A Lap Around VSTS 2010" Monday in San Francisco at the MSDN Developer Conference. Here's the link to my slide deck. For those who want to get their hands on the bits, here's a link with some guidance on how to work with the timed out Virtual PC image.

Installing Conchango Scrum for Team System

mikev — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 21:13:00 GMT

The Conchango Scrum for Team System process template is installed on the TFS application server. A prerequisite is Team Explorer 2008. Ever wonder why a UI component must be installed on the application server?

The processes used within the Scrum for TS template (and it's associtated web services) require access to the Team Foundation APIs that are installed as part of the Team Explorer. These APIs cannot be re-distributed along with the process template installer as several are compiled into native images during the installation process.

http://www.scrumforteamsystem.com/cs/forums/3271/ShowPost.aspx#3271

PDC Follow-up

mikev — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:10:00 GMT

PDC 2008 finished up last Thursday. I had a very productive time, both attending sessions and networking. Here are some of the session highlights:

Keynote on Day 1 - Windows Azure announcement by Ray Ozzie. The cloud is coming. With Windows Azure, Microsoft is beginning a new chapter of significant change where we will see more organizations using both on-premises and cloud based resources. We’re going to see really expanded SOA resources and will need to sharpen our distributed systems skills and apply some new principles to our development to best take advantage of Windows Azure.
A Lap Around Visual Studio Team System 2010 by Cameron Skinner. A lot of great focus on Test and Architecture. Test case management, dealing with “it works on my box” with some really awesome recording capabilities to provide context with the new test runner. The Architecture Explorer allows easy visualization of code, UML diagrams are now first class citizens, and the Layer diagram lets you see and test multi-tier relationships.

NET Framework 4.0 – The Future of C# - Anders Hejlsberg. Declarative, dynamic, concurrent – the classic taxonomies are increasingly overlapping. We’re moving from imperative to declarative programming. Language innovations will fall into four broad categories:
- Dynamically typed objects
- Optional and named parameters
- Improved COM interoperability
- Co- and Contra-variance
Deep Dive: Dynamic Languages in Microsoft .NET – Jim Hugunin. The DLR adds a shared dynamic type system, a standard hosting model and support for generating fast dynamic code on top of the CLR. Expressions trees, dynamic dispatch, and call site caching are the key features of the DLR. The DLR is open source to provide language access under MSPL plus availability in the commercial .NET stack.
Iron Ruby: The Right Language for the Right Job – John Lam. IronRuby is a new dynamically-typed language for Microsoft .NET that offers more runtime flexibility at the expense of compile-time verification. John provided an introduction to Iron Ruby that demonstrated the interactive benefits. He leveraged a micro-framework named Sinatra to demonstrate several examples.
A Lap Around “Oslo” – Vijaye Raji and Douglas Purdy. "Oslo" is the family of new technologies that enable model-driven development and execution of services and applications. So, “Oslo” is the platform for model driven applications. M (as in MVC - the language) is a textual language for building models and DSL’s. “Quadrant” is the tool for interacting with models and DSL’s. The Repository is the database for storing and sharing models.

Architecting Services for Windows Azure – Yousef Khalidi. From design to deployment, building a scalable, highly available service is different from building other kinds of applications. This session discussed the impact that designing for the cloud has on all stages of the service lifecycle, and how the Microsoft cloud platform works for you to meet the scaling and availability goals of your service. This session showed how automation is used to free the developer from dealing with many hardware and networking issues. The session also covered how the cloud services platform is architected to enable a pay-for-use dynamic model.
Parallel Programming for Managed Developers with Visual Studio 2010 – Daniel Moth. As Moore’s law continues to mature, processor speeds have leveled out but we’re getting more processors. Our software needs to harness this paradigm change. New .NET APIs, including the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and Parallel LINQ (PLINQ). Also, new features in the debugger will help us to quickly identify concurrency issues and visualize the internal state of our applications.

The Future of Unit Testing, Panel Discussion. Unit testing means different things to different people. To Agile developers, it enables Test Driven Development. To researchers, it enables test generation from static and dynamic analysis. To others, it's a means to test protocols, APIs, and other functionality below the presentation layer. Others still see it as a means to do conformance testing. This panel discussion could have gone on for hours but was great even for the limited time available.
Architecture Without Big Design Up Front – Peter Provost. Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS), code-name "Rosario" Architecture Edition, introduces new UML designers, use cases, activity diagrams, sequence diagrams that can visualize existing code, layering to enforce dependency rules, and physical designers to visualize, analyze, and refactor your software. The session showed how VSTS extends UML logical views into physical views of our code. We saw how to create relationships from these views to work items and project metrics, how to extend these designers, and how to programmatically transform models into patterns for other domains and disciplines.
Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server: How We Use It at Microsoft – Stephanie Saad. This session gave us a detailed look at the present and future of Team Foundation Server (TFS). With close to 14,000 users, 2,000 projects, 33 million files, and over 2 million work items, Microsoft runs one of the largest known installations of TFS. Stephanie talked about internal best practices for version control, branching and merging, work item tracking, metrics, reporting, testing, and integrations with TFS.

In addition to the sessions, networking was great. I had an opportunity to meet up with many of my community and Microsoft friends plus meet a lot of new people. I got to spend some time each day with the VSTS team and really appreciated the opportunity to get to know them better and see what kinds of issues PDC attendees wanted to discuss. Huddled with Doug Seven to work out some details on a new forthcoming VSTS INETA program. Wednesday included a chance to hand out with Scott Guthrie at his open spaces session.

Sunday evening included Party with Palermo. Monday evening was multi-tasking two dinners - the C# and VB team dinner (socialized before everyone sat down to eat) was a great get together (a big thanks to Charlie Calvert and Lisa Feigenbaum for making this happen) of community and the development teams including Anders Hejlsberg, Scott Hanselman, Beth Massi, Alan Greiver (YAG). It was then down the street to Roy's for a great dinner with many of the community and DPE folks and community influentials. Tuesday was a jam packed evening including dinner with the VSTS team and the Universal Studios evening hanging out with the Accentient crew and some of the VSTS team. Wendesday was the http://underground.socalcodecamp.com, a really cool event.