MSBuild command line vs. Visual Studio publish - asp.net-mvc

I have a solution with multiple projects, from which one is a web application of that I want to create deployment package. When publishing with Visual Studio, it publishes and deploys without any problems.
Due to some requirements, however, I need to publish it with command line and this is where I am having problems. Publishing alone works fine even in command line, but when I try to deploy package created in command line I get this error:
A value for the 'setAclUser' setting must be specified when the
'setAcl' provider is used with a physical path.
My msbuild command looks like this:
msbuild Solution.sln /p:DeployOnBuild=true /p:PublishProfile=Debug
One differences I noticed are that when publishing solution, PackageTemp folder is created in different projects and so when deploying it is printing different paths to cmd. With VS publish they look something like
"Default Web Site/MySite/..."
but with command line publish they look like this
"C:\MySolution\Project(only a library project, not the one I want to
publish)\obj\Debug\Package\PackageTemp..."
Thanks for any help
Edit: Created .zip packages are almost the same, except for archive.xml which has some different values and I suspect this to be the problem, but unfortunately I can't make any sense of what does this file actually represent.

Related

How do I get my Windows service solution to produce an artifact with VSTS Build?

I have a build definition in Visual Studio Team Services (a.k.a. Visual Studio Online? I'm not really sure the right name for it honestly) that is not producing an artifact, and I'm really not sure why. The main project in the solution file is a Windows service that is built using TopShelf. I suspect that maybe the MSBuild arguments in the Visual Studio Build task might be wrong. I copied them from a build definition for an MVC project that is working, but it occurs to me that they might not work for a Windows service.
Here they are:
/p:DeployOnBuild=true
/p:WebPublishMethod=Package
/p:PackageAsSingleFile=true
/p:SkipInvalidConfigurations=true
/p:PackageLocation="$(build.artifactstagingdirectory)\\"
I have a Copy Files task and a Publish Build Artifacts task later on in the process, but apparently the $(build.artifactstagingdirectory)\\ is empty. I get this warning:
##[warning]Directory 'd:\a\1\a' is empty. Nothing will be added to build artifact
Oddly enough, in another task in the process where I publish the symbols, everything appears to go off without a hitch.
One more bit: I'm using a hosted build agent. Not sure if that matters or not.
That's all of the pertinent information I can think to provide. Am I way off base here? I've used Octopus Deploy in the past and I know I had to install Octopack on my services. Do I need to do something similar here?
You don't need any of those MSbuild arguments; most of them apply to ASP .NET projects and will do nothing for a console application.
Replace them all with /p:OutDir=$(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory). That will tell MSBuild to put the build outputs in the artifact staging directory.

Use TFS/ RM 2015 Environment Variables/ Custom configuration

I have a console application that I am building on a on-premises tfs 2015 with a Visual Studio Build. What I want to achieve is:
If the application is executed on a dev machine during normal development there will be a simple message "Hello Developer" and if it was deployed in a qa environment and the tester runs it from there it should print "Hello Tester". Just a simple demo.
So I think I need an App.config to be able to store a configuration that will than be changed during the build process. I was confident that this is a no brainer as I found a lot of websites describing something like this but it turns out, that they all are not revealing the interesting bits like
How does the App.config needs to look like?
How is the variable used in C# code?
What are the needed settings in the Release Management Client?
What are the needed settings in the on-premises TFS Build Definition?
or were out-dated (TFS 2013 (1), RM Client 2013 (2)) or were using Visual Studio Online/ Team Services or were using custom tasks.
Can someone explain me, how to achieve the described scenario "Hello Developer"/ "Hello Tester"?
Thanks a lot!
We use MSDeploy for this type of setup. You can extend MSBuild by adding an Import line in your csproj file to a new .targets file in your project. Reference the MSDeploy task and use that to create a MSDeploy package for your console app. Finally create Parameterization files to define the config section you want to transform and SetParameters files for each environment with the appropriate message.
This blog post is for a database project but the basics steps are the same.
Within RM you would use MSDeploy to deploy the package with the appropriate SetParmeter file against the target server via a PowerShell command.
Have you tried with SlowCheetah?
This package allows you to automatically transform your app.config (or
any file) when you press F5 in Visual Studio. You can have different
transformations based on the build configuration. This will enable you
to easily have different app settings, connection strings, etc for
Debug versus Release. If you want to transform other files you can do
that too.

Generating nuget-packages for Octopus Deploy and Azure Cloud Services

I've been trying for a week to deploy a webrole to Azure Clous Services without quite getting there.
Here is my setup:
I've got a cloud solution with a cloud project and a MVC application (standard no changes to template yet). Its under source control in Visual Studio Online.
I'm using octopack to try generating the nuget package
I'm using the buildt in nuget repo from Octopus
The Octopus server and tentacle is hosted on a VM in azure
I've created a step-template for my deployment step (see this article)
My plan:
I'd like to have a CI build to a dev-service and a seperate build to push my project to the staging environment and roll it onto the production environment using Octopus.
My problem:
The packages that are produced by Octopack seems to not contain what they should. And I've tried to play around with the nuspec file included in my webrole to get it just right. Something ends up missing either way i try.
Have anyone gotten this to work? I'd appreciate any tips pointing me in the right direction as I've slowly been running out of ideas. So i turn to you my fellow nerdlings for some much needed help.
Regards
ZiGGstern
Correct me if I'm wrong but it looks like you're in need of the octo.exe to automate deployments after build within Visual Studio/TFS Online to your target environments.
I'm trying to focus on this statement:
I'd like to have a CI build to a dev-service and a seperate build to
push my project to the staging environment and roll it onto the
production environment using Octopus.
You can configure within your build-template, using the "Post-Deploy Script Path" a PowerShell script to call the Octo.exe (with an API Key) and fire off a deployment for your desired environment(s). You can customize this per build if you so choose. I've used this method by creating a folder within the root of my Solution (I call it 'Tools' but the name doesn't matter). Within that Tools folder, I add a PowerShell script AND the octo.exe. The PS script fires the Octo.exe which makes a call to my Octopus Server and with the "create release" option, I'm able to automatically deploy to whatever environment AFTER my build finishes within TFS. Make sure to always include those files (right-click in VS and in file properties select 'always copy').
I'm not quite sure why your NuGet packages would not be configured correctly, but that should be remedied first. Your question is trying to ask for two things and it's not clear which is more important to you; NuGet package or the Deployment from CI build. Having said that, I think you need to give more details on why you think your NuGet package is inadequate or not working correctly for your Azure services.
Please note, the site you supplied is using a custom PowerShell script in the form of a step template. It may be best to try the default Azure step within Octopus first before using a customized script. Just a thought.
Read more about the Octo.exe here: http://docs.octopusdeploy.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=360596

SSIS 2012 Continuous Integration with TFS 2013

I’ve been reading some articles (this one in particular: http://speaksql.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/a-journey-to-db-deployment-automaton-ssis-build-using-msbuild/) about using msbuild.exe to build and deploy an SSIS package (.ispac). I had no problem with that from my computer which has all the required assemblies, and only using the msbuild.exe command.
Once I tried to use the TFS Build Server I had some problems. First I realized that using a project with msbuild.exe (SSIS.MSBuild.proj) was not recommended with TFS 2013 since it was used with TFS 2008 and 2010. Anyway, I just wanted to make it work and it sounded plausible, but I had to use the TFSBuild.proj. That was not a problem, but my next problem was that the project I was being using (Microsoft SQL Server Community Samples: Integration Services) references a SQL Server assembly (Microsoft.SqlServer.ManagedDTS) which is not installed on my build server.
Then I realized that even if I managed to install that assembly on the gac, or referenced it on a relative path I would have a bigger problem next, I am using custom activities on my packages which I need to install using gacutil.exe on the host server, and I was wondering how to install, remotely, those dll.
That’s when I started to lose faith, and here I am, is there an “easy” way to implement continuous integration for SSIS packages without installing third party tools (http://remotegacutil.codeplex.com/ for example), and adding missing assemblies to the gac of a build server?
Did any of you have a similar issue? Did you solve it? How?
Thanks!
Use devenv.exe to build the ispac. Add an invoke process task and call out to devenv.
Add an Invoke Process to the Build Template, the one above shows a Sequence container, which assigns the path to the correct version of DeVenv to call, VS2010 /12 /13 etc. this is shown as hard coded but can be put into an argument, so it can be populated in individual build definitions. the one you can't see clearly is "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.com"
Next is the invoke Process, this call out to the specified devenv.exe and passes arguments used to build the ISPAC file.
The arguments are passed in localProject would get you the actual project you wanted to build in previous versions, you may have to do something different for 2013, due to the changes to the new templates.
this gives a TFS2012 way of doing it, as i say you may have to do something different to get the project that you want to build under 2013, but the build will run and an .ISPAC file will be generated.
at this point i would deploy the ISPAC using powershell, you may want to add additional scripts to the powershell calls to handle creating the SSIS Catalog and scheduling of the job.
deploying with Powershell can be found here Deploying ISPAC's with Powershell

TFS - automate deployments for IIS and SQL Server using Migrator.net

I am attempting to automate my process for deployments.
Currently, the following steps need run:
Run an external tool in Visual Studio to call Migrator.net (using MSBUILD) to update the database
Right-click the web project and publish locally
Copy the publish folder to all web servers for that specific website
I have now been looking at how to deploy directly from Visual Studio Team Services.
I have created a build definition that will compile my code, and using MSBuild arguments in the "Process" tab of the build definition, will use a publish profile to publish directly to IIS on a target machine. The arguments are something like this:
/p:DeployOnBuild=true;PublishProfile="test_publish.pubxml";UserName=xxx;Password=xxx
This works like a charm for the actual web content, but it does not deal with the database side of things.
The external tool to update the database, as I mentioned, calls MSBUILD with the following:
$(ProjectDir)\Migrations.proj /target:MigrateUAT /p:To=-1 /p:password=xxx
How would I change the build definition to also deal with this MSBuild call? I am at the limit of my MSBuild knowledge.
Thanks in advance.
I have not found out how to do this directly. So I am taking the approach to write a large MSBUILD script that will do everything I want, and only use Team Services to call this script. Rather than use the work flow stuff within the build definition.

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