MSDeploy to install windows service?

Question

We have a website which publishes events using NServiceBus. The site is deployed using msdeploy. We also have the NServiceBus.exe which should run as a windows service to subs

Answer 1

What we wound up doing was creating a 'controller' layer that coordinates deployment tasks, even one that could use msdeploy. Essentially, msdeploy is not the highest level of abstraction in our deployment system.

We chose to use MSBuild to coordinate those tasks of deploying items from a 'package'.

In our deployment process, a web application deployed with msdeploy is just another deployment item, just as is a Windows service.

In all disclosure, we have not actually created msdeploy deployment tasks yet, though it should/would drop in nicely to what we've already created, as MSBuild would invoke the msdeploy. We currently use MSBuild community tasks for webapp deployment automation, coordinated via MSBuild.

You can read a little more about how we 'generalized' our deployments via a blog post I did called "PANDA - Packaging ANd Deployment Automation".