Environment: TeamCity 6.5.1 on Win2k3, BuildAgent(s) on Win2k3, Visual Studio 2k10, .NET v4, Nant 0.91
I'm completing the setup of TeamCity and am trying to lock down the BuildAgent account on the build machine(s) per our security guidelines. The build is crashing the first time "devenv.exe /build" is called via the Nant script:
Faulting application devenv.exe, version 10.0.30319.1, stamp 4ba1fab3,
faulting module msenv.dll, version 10.0.30319.1, stamp 4ba1fd94,
debug? 0, fault address 0x0000c36b.
I had no luck googling that message. However, if I change the BuildAgent Service from the Local Network Account to the Administrator account, things work. However, if I use another domain account, it fails. Also fails if I add that domain account to the local Administrators group.
Any ideas on what I'm missing? Is there a specific privilege you need to have in order for a "DevEnv /build" to work without crashing?
Yuck, I just went through this recently. First, use devenv.com, not devenv.exe. The devenv with the com extension can build a solution and send all output to the console, without using the gui. As the TeamCity agent is a service, it may not be allowed to interact with the gui at all.
Second, and I realize that this might not be possible for you (especially if you are building an MSI), but consider doing whatever you need to do to use the built in Visual Studio build runner that comes with TeamCity. It does utilize MSBuild to do its work. If you go this route and you still need devenv, then go find MSBuild Extensions Pack, which has already solved a lot of these issues with their own devenv build task.
Honestly, I ended up replacing Microsoft's installation projects with alternatives (InstallShield or WiX), and never looked back.
Related
Before we used TFS, we were building our packages locally using visual studio. There was a lot of projects organized into solutions. When we wanted to build the package, we simply located the ccproj project, right click on it and hit “package”.
There is couple of specific in our solution:
We use web roles with multiple web sites and virtual applications and we have them as project dependencies in VS2012 solution
We use config transformations for both web and worker roles. Worker roles transforms was achieved by adding transform target manually to the project file.
We have some additional class library projects – their outputs needs to go in a subfolder of the worker role along with correct configuration files, it is kind of plug-in architecture. We used some xcopy commands to include these non-referenced libraries in our worker roles.
Everything worked smoothly when building in VS 2012 locally.
When migrated to TFS we quickly learned that we won’t be able to replicate the same build process on build server
It turned out that TFS is not preserving solutions structure, more
details here:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/tfsbuild/thread/9ac815c8-5961-4670-a6d0-660a9b66da9c
The project dependency that was solving multiple web sites and
virtual applications in a single role did not work on build server,
probably because of different output directory. We had to add some
hacks in our ccproj and csproj files to get these published and
correctly included in the resulting package.
xcopy commands failed because of different directory structures on
TFS build sever.
We had to force run cspack on TFS build server by explicitly adding
/t:Publish parameter to msbuild command line.
Config transforms for worker roles did not worked, we had to force to
occur using another hacks in the ccproj and csporj files.
There was more issues but those are too detailed. I would keep it on
high level just to illustrate the whole issue. The build somehow
works now, but we have now a lot of hacks in place now.
I have two questions:
Is it possible to configure TFS build server to have exact same
behavior as the local build in VS2012?
Is there any official solution for building azure packages with multiple web sites and virtual applications in a single web role?
I haven't yet tried this on a TFS build server, but the approach outlined in my blog at http://michaelcollier.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/multiple-sites-in-a-web-role/ has been working well. The "trick" is basically to modify the .ccproj file to tap into the CoreBuildDependsOn target, adding logic that will execute MSBuild against the secondary sites. This should also allow config transforms to work.
I'm using Visual Studio 2012 and the publishing feature. I have created a publishing profile that deploys my application to a development server, and it works great when executed from vs2012 on my machine. Here is my problem; on the development server I also have TeamCity installed and I would like to trigger the publishing after a build have completed. So I created a simple build step that looks like this:
Build file path: .\src\Solution.sln
Targets: Rebuild
Command line parameters: /p:DeployOnBuild=true;PublishProfile=Ci
When this step is executing I get the following error:
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v11.0\Web\Microsoft.Web.Publishing.targets(4377, 5): error ERROR_USER_NOT_ADMIN: Web deployment task failed.
(Connected to 'dev.domain.com' using the Web Deployment Agent Service, but could not authorize. Make sure you are an administrator on 'dev.domain.com'.
The Ci profile contains a username and password that works when I run the publishing from Visual Studio on my machine. I have also tried passing in username and password as parameters in the build step, but I get the same result. Do I need to run the TeamCity services under admin accounts to get this working? All suggestions are appreciated.
I have just blogged about this at http://sedodream.com/2013/01/06/CommandLineWebProjectPublishing.aspx.
You are pretty close, hopefully I can close the gap.
You are correct that username and password are specified in the VS publish dialog, but we do not save the password in the .pubxml file. It is currently being saved in the .pubxml.user file, and that file is not used at all for command line scenarios. Because of that you will need to pass in the property. So in your case it should be
msbuild .\src\solution.sln /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile=ci /p:Password=<insert-password>
If your web server does not have trusted certs you may need to also pass in /p:AllowUntrustedCertificate=true.
One little addition which may not be directly related to your issue, but may be helpful for others which may see this later.
If you are building the .csproj/.vbproj file (and potentially in some scenarios where the .sln file is used) you should pass in the property /p:VisualStudioVersion=11.0. More info on this available at my blog http://sedodream.com/2012/08/19/VisualStudioProjectCompatabilityAndVisualStudioVersion.aspx
I have a 3rd party web page screen capture DLL from http://websitesscreenshot.com/ that lets me target a URL and save the page to a image file. I've moved this code into my Azure-based project and when I run it on my local sandboxed dev box and save to the Azure blob, everything is fine. But when I push the bits to my live server on Azure, it's failing.
I think this is because either MSHTML.dll and/or SHDOCVW.dll are missing from my Azure configuration.
How can I get these libraries (plus any dependent binaries) up to Azure?
I found the following advice on an MSFT forum but haven't tried it yet. http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazuredevelopment/thread/0344dcff-6fdd-4479-a3b4-3e89750a92f4/
Hello, I haven't tried mshtml in the cloud. But generally speaking, to
use a native dll in a Web Role, you add the dll to the Web Role
project just like adding a picture (choose add existing items). Then
make sure the Build Action is set to Content. This tells Visual Studio
to copy the dll file to the output package.
Also check dependencies carefully. A lot of problems related to native
code are caused by missing dependencies, such as a particular VC++
runtime dll.
Thought I'd ask here first before I burn a day or two on an unproven solution.
EDIT #1:
it turns out that our problem was not related to MSHTML.dll or SHDOCVW.dll missing from the Azure server. They're there.
The issue is that by default new server instance have the IE security hardening feature enabled, and this was preventing our 3rd party dll from executing script. So we needed to turn off the enhanced IE security configuration settings. This is also a non-trivial exercise.
In the meantime, we just created a server-side version of the feature on our site we need to make screen captures from (e.g. we eliminated JSON-based rendering of UI on the client), and we were able to proceed.
I think the solution mentioned in the MSDN forum thread is correct. You should put them as part of your project files, so that the SDK will package and deploy them to the VM on the cloud.
But if they are COM and need to be registed you'd better call the register command via the Startup feature. Please check http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/hh351539
HTH
So I imagine this is a pretty simple problem, but I can't find anything about it.
I've set up CruiseControl.Net to check my svn repository for any changes every 30 seconds, and if there are any changes, build them using NAnt.
Everything works great - but only if I have the CruiseControl.Net console running at all time on the server. If I close the console, it won't check for changes and build them. I've checked the wiki for a way to set up continuous monitoring, but I can't find anything
Does the console always need to be running in order to detect changes, or is there another way to do this?
There are two ways to run CCNET: As console application or as windows service. You're looking for windows service mode.
Here is a tutorial on "Installing CCService". Be aware that this documentation is outdated. But it should give you an impression.
Installing CCNET as a windows service is an option during CCNET installation so this is the easiest way to get it up and running.
I've got a TFS build set up to build and deploy a web application. I'm passing in the MSDeploy parameters via the TFS build definition's MSBuild arguments. First time round this is working fine. When someone accesses the web app, one of the controls (Microsoft charting control) generates a couple of files in an empty directory I've added to the solution.
When I go to rebuild (or continuous integration is triggered) the next build will usually fail because it can't delete one of the generated files. When I try and manually delete the file it tells me that IIS worker process is using it and it can't be deleted.
Now to get the build building I'd have to manually restart IIS every time, which is not desirable with CI in mind. I've taken a look through Microsoft.Web.Publishing.Tasks.dll and there's nothing there to restart IIS using MSDeploy.
At the moment I'm thinking that adding stubs of the temporary files in the solution might be a resolution (maybe MSDeploy will be able to close the process if the file is a permanent part of the deployment) or I could do some unpleasantness with Exec in the solution file to get an IIS reset.
It's probably a long shot but has anyone come up against this and found a nice solution?
You could use MSBuild Extension Pack to stop the application pool automatically before deployment. There are several tasks in the MSBuild.ExtensionPack.Web namespace to manage IIS, such as stopping and starting an application pool, deleting an application, etc.