Improving Your Build Process

Question

Or, actually establishing a build process when there isn\'t much of one in place to begin with.

Currently, that\'s pretty much the situation my group faces. We do web-a

Answer 1

I have a set of Powershell scripts that do all of this for me.

Script 1: Build - this one is simple, it is mostly handled by a call to msbuild, and also it creates my database scripts.

Script 2: Package - This one takes various arguments to package a release for various environments, such as test, and subsets of the production environment, which consists of many machines.

Script 3: Deploy - This is run on each individual machine from within the folder created by the Package script (the Deploy script is copied in as a part of packaging)

From the deploy script, I do sanity checks on things like the machine name so things don't accidentally get deployed to the wrong place.

For web.config files, I use the

feature to have overrides that are already on the production machines, and they are read-only so they don't accidentally get written over. The Local.config files are not checked in, and I don't have to do any file switching at build time.

[Edit] The equivalent of appSettings file= for a config section is configSource="Local.config"