.net - Automate Deployment for Web Applications?

Question

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Answer 1

Thank you all for your kind suggestions. We checked them all out, but after careful consideration we decided to roll our own with a combination of CruiseControl, NAnt, MSBuild and MSDeploy.

This article has some great information: Integrating MSBuild with CruiseControl.NET

Here's roughly how our solution works:

• Developers build the 'debug' version of the app and run unit tests, then check in to SVN.
• CruiseControl sees the updates and calls our build script...
  • Runs any new migrations on the build database
  • Replaces the config files with the build server config
  • Builds the 'debug' configuration of the app
  • Runs all unit and integration tests
  • Builds the 'deploy' configuration of the app
    • Versions the DLLs with the current major/minor version and SVN revision, e.g. 1.2.0.423
    • Moves this new build to a 'release' folder on our build server
    • Removes unneeded files
  • Updates IIS on the build server if required

Then when we have verified everything is ready to go up to live/staging we run another script to:

• Run migrations on live/staging server
• MSDeploy: archive current live/staging site
• MSDeploy: sync site from build to live/staging

It wasn't pretty getting to this stage, but it's mostly working like a charm now :D

I'm going to try and keep this answer updated as we make changes to our process, as there seem to be several similar questions on SA now.