In our company we regularly create MSI's with Installshield(latest).
These setups adhere to a set of rules and name schemes so they work with our deployment system and autobuilds etc.
Is there a way to eliminate the repetitive overhead of going through all the boilerplate stuff (setting the company meta data, basic folder structures, a few events, including some default helper files etc) for each setup?
Take a look at the InstallShield Automation interface. What I did was:
Abstract all my components out into WiX Merge Modules ( could be IS merge modules though ).
Create a base InstallShield project ( Common.ISM )
Create XML files to describe my feature tree and product configurations
Create Build Automation to reflect the XML and invoke the Automation Interface to "Emit" my installer source.
Build the Product Config in the ISM.
This gave me a great deal of code reuse but it's not trivial to set up this type of system. However it scales very well and the advantages are huge if you have the right business needs.
There are two ways you can do this:
Save the ism file in xml format (there is a setting for this in the project settings). Then in run time, push the desired values with a new application that could be written (which will edit the XML file using DOM or so...)
Use InstallShield Automation interface. This can be done using VBScript. You may check this link: InstallShield Automation Interface
Related
I made some test sequences and a workspace in TestStand. I want to deploy those sequences and make a MSI based executable. However, I am not sure how can I include the files for Simple or Full Featured UI into the workspace and include it during deployment or call the UI content folder directly during the deployment.
Can anyone please help me?
Just insert folder with custom user interface into workspace https://www.ni.com/docs/en-US/bundle/teststand/page/tsref/infotopics/db_add_file_to_wksp.htm.
Then you will see inserted files in Deployment Utility.
But better practice would be to separate installers of user interface, and sequence itself. Because mostly you will do more changes/updates/fixes to sequence files, so you will need to redeploy just them.
This is a big undertaking, but may be worth it for you depending on the size of your company. TestStand has an API that you can use to develop a custom GUI. That GUI can then open any sequence file you like after being compiled as a C program that runs as an executable file.
My team has been developing a software package for a while. The code is under source version control. Until now, every developer has been setting up their own development environment manually (we use Visual C++, recently upgraded to 2012). Now that the structure of the project has grown more complicated and the build configuration is non-trivial, I decided to create a portable solution and add it to the source control system for the convenience of newcomers.
The problem is I need the developers to be able to set up the solution according to their particular needs (mostly preprocessor #define's) without disturbing the solution for everybody else.
VC++ is creating a .user file for every project that seems to be designed to hold settings on a per-user basis, but I'm not sure how to add settings so they are stored in this file (which I exclude from source control) and not in the project file or the property sheet files (which are included in source control).
How can I accomplish this? Thanks.
Background
I work in QA at a software company.
We have about a half a dozen different web applications, each of which may require, at any given site, some customised settings added to its web.config file.
These can range from which Oracle database/schema(s) the app connects to, to how many search results to cache, to which hierarchy to use when sorting items on a web page.
We make use of Microsoft's Deploy package, to get the new releases installed/updated on client sites.
When we put out a new release, some of these customised settings may have been added to or removed from the given web app's web.config file, but using Deploy to import the new release over the top of the old one will clobber any customisations that may have been made.
Alternatives
There are ways of handling this manually, such as merging via a plain text comparison of the old and new web.config files, but these are cumbersome and prone to human error.
I was reading about transformations and thought they could be of some use.
There is also the capability to use external files (tip #8) which seems like a good way to go.
Improvement?
Should our programmers be providing some sort of semi-automated merge facility for this web.config file? Does the Deploy package provide this somehow?
Should we be making use of the external config files, as a best practice?
Is the concept of customising this web.config file at each site so fundamentally flawed that the whole thing needs to be re-thought?
Microsoft provides Web.config transformations as the de-facto way to do this. You can create different deployment configurations within Visual Studio and the web projects. Then when you build or your build server builds with that particular configuration the web.config is transformed to contain the settings you want to see.
View more about web.config transforms here.
In a typical enterprise scenario with in-house development, you might have dev, staging, and production environments. You might use SVN to contain ongoing development work in a trunk, with patches being stored in branches, and your released code going into appropriately named tags. Migrating binaries from one environment to the next may be as simple as copying them to middle-ware servers, GAC'ing things that need to be GAC'ed, etc. In coordination with new revisions of binaries, databases are updated, usually by adding stored procedures, views, and adding/adjusting table schema.
In a Sharepoint environment, you might use a similar version control scheme. Custom code (assemblies) ends up in features that get installed either manually or via various setup programs. However, some of what needs to be promoted from dev to staging, and then onto production might be database content that supports the custom code bits.
If you've managed an enterprise Sharepoint environment, please share thoughts on how you manage promotion of code and content changes between environments, while protecting your work and your users, and keeping your sanity.
I assume when you talk about database content you are referring to the actual contents contained in a site a or a list.
Probably the best way to do this is to use the stsadm import and export commands to export and import content from one environment to another. (Don't use backup/restore when going from one environment to another.)
For any file changes (assemblies, aspx) you can use Features and then keep track of the installers. You would install the feature and do an upgrade to push changes.
There's no easy way to sync the data...you can use stsadm import/export commands as John pointed out. But this may not be straight-forward, especially if the servers are configured differently.
There's also Data Sync Studio product (http://www.simego.net/DataSync_Studio.aspx) you can try.
Depending on what form the database content takes, I would keep the creation of it in code so it's all in one place (your Visual Studio project) and can also be managed via source control. Deployment of the content could either be via a console application or even better feature receiver.
You might also like to read this blog post and look at the tool mentioned there for another approach.
The best resource I can point you to is Eric's paper:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb428899.aspx
I was part of a team working to better the story around development of WSS and MOSS solutions with TFS, but I don't know where that stands.
I'm looking for something that can copy (preferably only changed) files from a development machine to a staging machine and finally to a set of production machines.
A "what if" mode would be nice as would the capability to "rollback" the last deployment. Database migrations aren't a necessary feature.
UPDATE: A free/low-cost tool would be great, but cost isn't the only concern. A tool that could actually manage deployment from one environment to the next (dev->staging->production instead of from a development machine to each environment) would also be ideal.
The other big nice-to-have is the ability to only copy changed files - some of our older sites contain hundreds of .asp files.
#Sean Carpenter can you tell us a little more about your environment? Should the solution be free? simple?
I find robocopy to be pretty slick for this sort of thing. Wrap in up in a batch file and you are good to go. It's a glorified xcopy, but deploying my website isn't really hard. Just copy out the files.
As far as rollbacks... You are using source control right? Just pull the old source out of there. Or, in your batch file, ALSO copy the deployment to another folder called website yyyy.mm.dd so you have a lovely folder ready to go in an emergency.
look at the for command for details on how to get the parts of the date.
robocopy.exe
for /?
Yeah, it's a total "hack" but it moves the files nicely.
For some scenarios I used a freeware product called SyncBack (Download here).
It provides complex, multi-step file synchronization (filesystem or FTP etc., compression etc.). The program has a nice graphical user interface. You can define profiles and group/execute them together.
You can set filter on file types, names etc. and execute commands/programs after the job execution. There is also a job log provided as html report, which can be sent as email to you if you schedule the job.
There is also a professional version of the software, but for common tasks the freeware should do fine.
You don't specify if you are using Visual Studio .NET, but there are a few built-in tools in Visual Studio 2005 and 2008:
Copy Website tool -- basically a visual synchronization tool, it highlights files and lets you copy from one to the other. Manual, built into Visual Studio.
aspnet_compiler.exe -- lets you precompile websites.
Of course you can create a web deployment package and deploy as an MSI as well.
I have used a combination of Cruise Control.NET, nant and MSBuild to compile, and swap out configuration files for specific environments and copy the files to a build output directory. Then we had another nant script to do the file copying (and run database scripts if necessary).
For a rollback, we would save all prior deployments, so theoretically rolling back just involved redeploying the last working build (and restoring the database).
We used UnleashIt (unfortunate name I know) which was nicely customizable and allowed you to save profiles for deploying to different servers. It also has a "backup" feature which will backup your production files before deployment so rollback should be pretty easy.
I've given up trying to find a good free product that works.
I then found Microsoft's Sync Toy 2.0 which while lacking in options works well.
BUT I need to deploy to a remote server.
Since I connect with terminal services I realized I can select my local hard drive when I connect and then in explorer on the remote server i can open \\tsclient\S\MyWebsite on the remote server.
I then use synctoy with that path and synchronize it with my server. Seems to work pretty well and fast so far...
Maybe rsync plus some custom scripts will do the trick.
Try repliweb. It handles full rollback to previous versions of files. I've used it whilst working for a client who demanded its use and I;ve become a big fan of it, partiularily:
Rollback to previous versions of code
Authentication and rules for different user roles
Deploy to multiple environments
Full reporting to the user via email / logs statiing what has changed, what the current version is etc.