Microsoft's web platform includes various tools and technologies which, together, give you a whole lot of control over your web deployment and ALM scenarios. Visual Studio tooling, MSBuild, the Web Publishing Pipeline, the IIS Web Deployment Tool (Web Deploy), VSDBCMD.exe, the Web Farm Framework, and other tools can all work together to give you some really powerful and flexible deployment solutions. The problem has always been that these tools are documented individually, and if you want to figure out how to use them together then you've got your work cut out.
Until now, that is :-)
Over the past six months, I've been working with Tom Dykstra and Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi at Microsoft to create some tutorials on web deployment in the enterprise. I'm pleased to announce that we've now published the series, Deploying Web Applications in Enterprise Scenarios, to the www.asp.net website.
The tutorial series is huge - over 60,000 words - and covers many different aspects of enterprise-scale web deployment. Throughout the authoring process, our aim was to provide holistic, end-to-end guidance on how to meet common deployment requirements, rather than simply focusing in on individual tools. Some of my personal highlights are:
- Want a good introduction to MSBuild and custom project files? Check out Understanding the Project File.
- Want to know how to generate web deployment packages that you can import into IIS (manually or automatically)? Check out Building and Packaging Web Application Projects.
- Want to know how to configure server farms to handle remote web application deployment? Check out Enterprise Deployment Series 2: Configuring Server Environments for Web Deployment.
- Want to manage deployment as part of a build process in TFS? Check out Enterprise Deployment Series 3: Configuring Team Foundation Server for Web Deployment.
Do take a look, and I hope you find the tutorials valuable.
