Is it possible to create a build with VS2012 (and TFS2012), based on a changetset id, that delivers a set of binaries (web) and a set of web.configs per enviroment ?
Is it possible to create a build with VS2012 (and TFS2012), based on a
changetset id
Yes queue a new build, when the confirmation window appears, goto the parameters tab and under GetVersion enetr the changeset you want to build for, you may have to enter a C or a CS infornt, i.e. for changeset 999 c999 or cs999.
that delivers a set of binaries (web) and a set of web.configs per
enviroment ?
Your binaries 'should' be target environment agnostic so you should be able to build once, deploy many times. your config files will depend on how you set them up, if you use the transform mechanism your configs will be created based on your Build configration. if you do your transforms a different way, you could add a post build task to copy the configs 'n' amount of times and then do a find replace type action to enter your environment specific config into each file
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I have created an Azure Web Site and connected it to Visual Studio Online, and this automatically set up a continuous deployment build (as per this page).
Initially this worked for a solution with one project, but now I have added a Web API project as a back end. This is named such that it is the first of the two projects alphabetically, and so now it is the only project that gets built and deployed whenever files are checked in. Which leads to my question:
How can I modify the default continuous deployment build to deploy both applications?
I'm sure it must be a fairly simple change to either the build template or parameters, or the publish profiles that are being used by the build. The only problem is I don't know: A) how to change those settings in the default TfvcContinuousDeploymentTemplate.12.xaml build template, and B) how to modify the publish profiles that are used in the continuous deployment build.
I have already, from within Visual Studio, manually published the two projects and got them to deploy to the right locations by following the instructions in this answer. I right-clicked on each project, clicked publish, then selected the "Microsoft Azure Web Apps" publish target which (after filling in all the settings) added the publish profiles to my projects and allowed me to manually deploy them how I wanted.
Unfortunately there seems to be no way to re-upload those publish profiles so that they can be used in the CD build. I've checked them into source control, I just need to know how I can get the CD build to make use of them. How can I do this?
After reading through the first link in my question again, I noticed that you can edit the build definition (or template) to point to the publish profile that you want to use:
Path to Deployment Settings: The path to your .pubxml file for a web app, relative to the root folder of the repo. Ignored for cloud services.
Unfortunately, this both doesn't work and only allows you to specify one publish profile file. Presumably, even if specifying this argument worked, the build would still only deploy the first app in alphabetical order.
This lead me to this question and answer though, which suggests that the Azure/TFVC continuous deployment works simply by using the ordinary Web Deploy arguments to MSBuild. Looking at the diagnostic logs of my build in Visual Studio Online proved this to be the case; here are the relevant arguments:
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\14.0\bin\amd64\msbuild.exe /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:CreatePackageOnPublish=true /p:DeployIisAppPath=mysitename
So, as per that question, to use a specific publish profile you can just set the additional necessary MSBuild arguments in the build definition:
Each project needs to have a publish profile called "publishprofilename.pubxml", in this case, checked into source control. I found that the user name (which is your site name with a dollar sign in front of it) is not needed, but unfortunately the password string is required. If you don't include it you get an error like this in the build:
Web deployment task failed. (Connected to the remote computer
("[mysitename].scm.azurewebsites.net") using the Web Management Service,
but could not authorize.
No other arguments were required for me, but it doesn't seem ideal that the password has to be included. The default deployment setup, without using publish profiles, must be authorising with that password somehow, but I don't know how.
So after making this change I navigated to [mysitename].azurewebsites.net, and it appeared that still only the Web API project was being deployed. However, by going to console for the site and entering dir D:\home\site\wwwroot I can see that both projects are actually being deployed. It's just that both projects are being deployed to the root of the site, at D:\home\site\wwwroot. The DeployIisAppPath settings are different in each publish profile, but these values are being ignored. This is because the /p:DeployIisAppPath=mysitename argument to MSBuild (mentioned above) overrides any PropertyGroup settings in publish profile *.pubxml files, as described in this blog post.
What I have found is that the continuous deployment process for Azure/TFVC works by having an InitializeContinuousDeployment build activity in the TfvcContinuousDeploymentTemplate.12.xaml build template, immediately before the RunMSBuild activity. This takes the MSbuild arguments you specify in the build definition, and appends to them the ones needed to deploy to Azure. Unfortunately, this is mostly hard-coded, and that means it always specifies a single deployment path for all web projects in the solution. You can't deploy each web app to a different location using publish profiles alone.
So one workaround option is to add something like a BeforeBuild MSBuild target to each project, to override the command line value of DeployIisAppPath. The problem with this is that the path specified in the publish profile, and seen in the publish wizard, will no longer be the path actually being used for deployment.
So the solution I went with is marginally better; it is what we would describe in New Zealand as "huckery".
Basically I added an InvokeMethod build activity between the InitializeContinuousDeployment and RunMSBuild activities. The arguments for this activity are as follows:
DisplayName:
Configure build for using publish profiles (removes DeployIisAppPath MSBuild parameter)
GenericTypeArguments:
System.String
MethodName:
SetValue
TargetObject:
AdvancedBuildSettings
Parameters:
Direction: Type: Value
In String "MSBuildArguments"
In String String.Join(" ", AdvancedBuildSettings.GetValue(Of String)("MSBuildArguments", String.Empty).Split(New String() {" "}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries).Where(Function(s) Not s.StartsWith("/p:DeployIisAppPath=")))
What this does is removes the DeployIisAppPath argument from the MSBuild command line arguments list completely, so that it doesn't override this same property in the publish profiles. Instead of the messing around with splitting and joining the string, it would be slightly nicer if you could just append /p:DeployIisAppPath="" to the command line, but this just sets the property to an empty string and you get an error:
"ConcatFullServiceUrlWithSiteName" task was not given a value for the
required parameter "SiteAppName"
So like I said, pretty huckery, but it's a solution that allows you to have continuous deployment of multiple web projects to Azure with a minimal amount of changes to the default setup.
You can override the deployment engine in Kudu by using the Azure CLI Tools. Running the azure site deploymentscript command and passing in the parameters for one of your projects -s <solutionFile> --aspWAP <projectFilePath>.
This will create a .deployment file and a deploy.cmd (or deploy.sh if you pass the -t bash parameter) modifying the deploy.cmd to add build/deploy steps for the second project.
More information is on deployment hooks is available in the project kudu wiki.
EDIT
You can use App Setting COMMAND to add a deployment script to your site.
When configuration the build definition, I have the option of copying the build output to the server:
We are using the VSO Host Build Controller and Azure's Continuous Integration build template to release to our development environment after every check-in.
Is there any reason why we need to have this value set? How could it ever be useful?
The Copy build output to the server will put the output of the build as a zip file attached the build that can be downloaded later.
In a situation where you don't care about the build output because you have it setup to continuously deploy to Azure (or some other build based deployment) you would not use this option.
If you however needed to download the output, for example a Windows Store App that you need to publish to the Store manually, then you could use this to get the application.
In VSO you most likely don't have a Drop Server (unless you have invested in Azure heavily) so you have 2 choices:
Put them in source control. Only in TFVC, not Git. Also fills up your Repo with Large Files.
Attach them to the build as a Zip.
The second scenario is exactly where you would use this.
Okay, I have a couple inquiries:
1 - Let's say I have a solution that references several external projects. I want to reference specific Labels (that represent stable versions) on those external projects. I know that you can do this by doing a Get Specific Version by Label on those projects. But once you've done that, is there a convenient way to do a Get on the whole solution, and have it preserve all of the specific versions?
Ultimately, I would like to do a single Get and have it get latest where that is applicable and get specific versions where that is applicable. It seems frustrating to have to do separate Gets on all the projects.
2 - Is it possible to build binaries from labels? When an external project is a stable version that isn't going to change, it makes sense to just reference the binary. When you create a label and build it, does it generate binaries in a specific location for that label that can be referenced?
On your first question: While TFS allows you to grab sources by Label, there is no way to setup a a workspace configuration that is bound to a specific Label or Changeset for a specific path. The only thing I can think of would be to create a batch file which fetches the latest version:
tf get $/Project/Sources /Version:T /recusive
tf get $/Project/ComponentA /version:LMyLabelName1 /recursive
tf get $/Project/ComponentB /version:LMyLabelName2 /recursive
The way forward to do this is to publish your external references to a NuGet repository (can be your own) and then configure NuGet to get a specific version. A CI build can publish a new version to your NuGet server. And you can setup your own server so that you don't need to publish all your binaries to a public server.
On your second question: yes you can build by label in the Queue Build screen you can setup the version to build which will be built:
You can specify a Changeset number (C######), Label (LLabelname) etc. Any version spec will do (see the commandline docs for a explanation on version specs).
By default, no easy referencable name is generated if you build by label. I suspect that some clever build customization will allow you to drop the build output in a predefined folder based on the label name, but there is no such out-of-the-box functionality.
How do I have SSDT run my publish script when I build my solution file?
If you:
1) Right click on your solution
2) Click Configration Properties
3) Click Configuration
I can see the database project and where it is checked to deploy on build, it does not let me specify what publish script to use.
As far as I know this isn't possible out of the box.
Why? They are two very different things.
Building (if you were to think of it as code) compiles and checks, producing artefacts. For .NET code those artefacts are DLL's/.exe etc. For .sqlproj it's the .dacpac etc that turn up in /sql/[Build Configuration Name].
Publishing is akin to Deploying if you were talking .NET code. Building won't include Publishing as an action.
Ironically, a Publish action also Builds the solution, so my suggestion would instead be to consider one of the following:
Publish the project (right click Publish, or double click your chosen .publish.xml file) whenever you want to build.
Use the Post-Build command line in the project Properties to call sqlpackage.exe to deploy your newly compiled .dacpac with your specified .publish.xml profile - but note that this will also impact your use of the Publish action from within Visual Studio as a Publish builds and then publishes (so you'd end up publishing twice).
Depending on your comfort levels/if you are a command-line fan, then use the command line (bash file? Powershell?) to call msbuild followed by sqlpackage.exe. Whenever you want to build, run your command in cmd.exe.
Similar to #3, add a menu item to the Tools menu that would do exactly the same thing (msbuild followed by sqlpackage deployment) but from within Visual Studio itself.
Look at a Continuous Integration model (TFS/TeamCity/Bamboo/Jenkins and about 3000-others), which could build and deploy for you automatically with every change - either on another server, or running locally (I put this in without knowing your scenario, so may be very much unsuitable to solve your problem).
The solution I'm building contains a whole lot of projects. One of them, Web, is the front end web site, and is being built and deployed to the QA server by default when a QA build is run. I have another project, called Service (and an associated Service.TestHarness), which I'd like to deploy to the same server as part of the same build. Where in the build's settings, or in the BuildProcessTemplate, can I configure this?
I've tried creating a deployment package via Visual Studio and importing this manually in IIS on the QA server, but got the error "This access control list is not in canonical form and therefore cannot be modified" which I haven't been able to resolve either.
Current build settings:
DeploymentApplicationPath = QA server's address
DeploymentComputer = QA server's name
DeploymentPackageSource = Web.zip
PerformDeploy = true
PerformDeploymentBackup = true
There's four ways you can do this:
1) pass everything as parameters to msbuild using the Team Build Process settings This is the least flexible and doesn't work well if you have multiple deployment projects as you currently have
2) create a custom target and a set of conditions in the project files and let msbuild handle the deployment, don't configure anything in the Build Definition itself (other than maybe setting a property on the msbuild command line arguments to enable a specific deployment)
3) use the Solution Configuration to create a specific solution configuration for each deployment you want to do and when specifying the solution/configuration to build in the build definition, enter your own custom configuration
4) let Team Build handle the build and use something like TFS Deployer or Powershell to handle the actual deployment of the packages.