Microsoft Web Deployment Team Blog : IIS News

New release of MS Deploy RC1

faith_a — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:08:00 GMT

We have a new release of the RC1 build to fix a couple issues that people found. We recommend that folks download the new version as it fixes some important issues.

How can I get the new build?

Just go to our download links for x86 and x64.

How does it upgrade if I already have the earlier RC1 build?

If you install the new build, it will automatically uninstall the older build and install the new one.

How does it work if my server is running the old RC1 (437) and my client is running the new RC1 (438)?

You will get an error that there is a version mismatch. The reason for this is that if your builds are out of sync, something might be different in the syncing process and cause an error. So we require the client and server to be running the same build.

What issues were fixed?

Installing an application package in certain time zones would result in an error.
Skip and replace rules didn't work properly.
A couple of other smaller infrastructure changes.

Let us know if you see any issues!

Thanks,

-faith

Web Deployment Tool RC1 has shipped

faith_a — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:44:00 GMT

The Web Deployment team is excited to announce that RC1 shipped this morning! We now have a release candidate that can be used for production testing and supports many new features.

So what did we add, you ask?

The biggest feature is our integration with the Web Platform Installer, or WebPI. Now you can use WebPI to seamlessly install community web applications DotNetNuke or WordPress on your machine including all of their dependencies such as IIS, ASP.NET, PHP, etc., using the Web Deployment Tool to perform the application install. You can even submit your own applications into the Windows Web Application Gallery so they can be included in WebPI!

Beyond that we have a bunch of features as well as a lot of performance and stabilization work.

Web application packaging and deployment additions:

Added the ability to create packages by hand without requiring the Web Deployment Tool to be installed.
Enhanced the iisApp provider so that IIS application packages can be installed on IIS 6.0 (Windows 2003) and IIS 5.1 (XP).
Added the setAcl provider, which allows you to set ACLs on a destination machine. You can set ACLs on a folder or file and specify a username or group. It can also automatically detect the application pool or anonymous user to set ACLs for.
Improved the parameterization feature, including:
- A single parameter can be written to multiple places, instead of requiring a user to enter the information multiple times.
- Tags for parameters that can be interpreted by code or the IIS Manager UI, so that you can remove parameters if they aren't needed, for example.
- New parameter types, giving you more flexibility.
- UI support so that any parameter type can be created.
Added support for multiple database types.
Added the ability to create packages in the IIS Manager that include more than just IIS applications and SQL databases, now any provider can be included in a package.

Web server synchronization additions:

Added logging for the Remote Agent Service, so that you can easily troubleshoot remote sync issues.
Improved the logging for the Web Deployment Handler so that less unnecessary data is logged.
Added automatic detection of encrypted properties in IIS configuration, so that an encryption password must be set.
Improved the performance of synchronizations and fixed several of the issues with syncing large amounts of content.

Downloads
x86 version: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9656139
x64 version: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9656140

Documentation
Walkthroughs can be found at the Web Deployment Tool main page.
Full product documentation can be found at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd569024.aspx.

Please join us in the forums and tell us what you think. What's great, what's bad, what's missing... we want to know!

Happy deployments!

Visual Studio 2010 deployment features (including MS Deploy)

faith_a — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 18:15:00 GMT

We briefly mentioned that Visual Studio 2010 is integrating the Web Deployment Tool, but we didn't really go into details.

Here's a great blog post that covers the highlights of VS 2010 deployment features, not just MS Deploy, but a lot of other cool stuff as well!

http://blogs.msdn.com/webdevtools/archive/2009/02/04/web-deployment-with-vs-2010-and-iis.aspx

The Web Deployment Tool is @ PDC!

faith_a — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 20:49:00 GMT

Just wanted to let everyone know that a bunch of us from the IIS and MS Deploy team are here at PDC 2008 in sunny Los Angeles! If you're here for PDC, please stop by the Windows Server 2008 Web Platform booth or check out our great talks on web deployment. We have some great news being announced and we'd love to meet folks that are currently using or interested in using the Web Deployment Tool.

Happy deployments!

Faith Allington, and the entire Web Deployment Tool team

Web Deployment Tool Beta 1 (Go Live) just released

faith_a — Tue, 13 May 2008 21:58:00 GMT

Today the Web Deployment Team released the Beta 1 version of the deployment tool! If you're not familiar with the tool already, it is here to help you keep sites or servers in sync with IIS6 or IIS7, as well as migrate from IIS6 to IIS7. One of the key things we've worked on is the flexibility of the underlying framework, which you can see in the number of rules, the ability to configure dependencies and especially, the different providers that we support.

You can sync or migrate not only the configuration of a web site, but also it's physical content and any SSL certificates. We also allow you to create your own manifest and define an application the way that you choose. Does your application depend on an assembly in the GAC? Or a registry key? These can be added to the manifest.

Okay, enough about the tool, for everyone who has been waiting patiently for this latest release and given us excellent feedback in the forums, THANK YOU! Please give the tool a try and let us know what you think.

Listed below are the links for the download pages for each of the individual installation packages:

32-bit Installation Package:
- Microsoft Web Deployment Tool (x86)
64-bit Installation Package:
- Microsoft Web Deployment Tool (x64)

We've loaded this version with many great new features such as:

PowerShell Support - We have PowerShell cmdlets so that you can integrate MS Deploy commands with PowerShell directly.
Enhanced Dependency Checking - We have IIS7 dependency information listed, plus the ability to see where a dependency is being triggered from. For example, if you have a dependency on Windows Authentication, you can now determine where this is set in the configuration.
Detailed Help File - We have a Help chm file included in the tool so that you can browse through all the functionality and flexibility offered by the tool, instead of looking through online walkthroughs.

And much more. :)

Please don't forget to check out the latest release notes available online at http://www.iis.net/Downloads/files/MSDeploy/beta1/msdeploy_readme.html for important known issues!

Thanks again, and many happy deployments,
-Faith Allington, Program Manager, and the entire Web Deployment team

Core components of Microsoft Web Deployment tool

ksingla — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 06:27:00 GMT

There are four concepts that are important for you to understand to be able to effectively use the new Microsoft Web Deployment Tool.

1. Providers

Providers are pieces of code that provide data to the tool for various operations like sync. The tool always starts with one provider, with an optional path for the provider. The provider builds the view of the part of the system it can handle, and uses other providers to represent system parts that they handle. These views are internally represented in xml. For example, if you begin with the dirPath provider, it will build an xml view of the folder (specified by the path), which will include files and subfolders present in it. It will delegate the task of handling files to the filePath provider and handling subdirectories to another dirPath provider object.

Parameters you pass in the –source and –dest switches at the command line specify the providers which builds xml views of source and destination systems. Then, the tool only needs to compare these xml views and call for Add, Update, or Delete operations on the destination to make its xml view same as source. Each provider is responsible for handling each of these operations.

Some examples of providers that are provided out of the box are dirPath, appHostConfig, and metaKey. You can see the full list of supported providers in Microsoft.Web.Deployment.config or by running the tool with no parameters to see the Help output. The tool also supports custom providers, which are built by combining one or more existing providers. Two examples of built-in custom providers are the webServer and webServer60 providers, whose definitions can be found in Microsoft.Web.Deployment.config. You can also create these custom manifests in a separate xml file and then use –source:manifest=<xmlfile> to use it as a source. When doing a sync or migrate, the same provider must be used for the source and destination. So if you are using a manifest as the source of your operation, you must also use the manifest provider as the destination. The only exception is the archiveDir provider, which can be used with other providers.

2. Links

Link extensions (or links) are executed for each entry generated by the providers. Links basically connect otherwise unrelated data based on logic coded in the extensions. An example of a link extension is the ContentExtension, which pulls in content whenever it sees a virtualDirectory configuration element added by appHostConfig provider or sees a path metaProperty. It does this by adding a dirPath entry under the virtual directory configuration, and the dirPath provider then pulls in all the content. Another example is the CertificateExtension, which is responsible for pulling in certificate whenever SSLCertHash is seen in the configuration.

Link extensions are executed for all verbs, so a dump will also cause link extensions pull in additional data. If you want to disable a link extension while executing a command, you can use –disableLink switch provided. For example, –disableLink:ContentExtension will cause content to not be included in a view of virtual directory configuration, which would allow for syncing of two servers without moving any content. Link extensions rely on providers to actually pull in the data and are limited by what providers are supported and can do. Together providers and link extensions provide the view of the system that can be dumped, archived, synced, or migrated.

3. Rules

Rules are small pieces of code that have logic to do something special and are evaluated only when a sync operation is performed (not during a dump). A few examples of things that rules do are normalizing paths using environment variables, skipping UNC paths, skipping configProtectedData configuration, etc. By default, rules only run if they are marked with the isDefault attribute set to true. The -enableRule and -disableRule switches will enable or disable a rule explicitly at the command line. For example, –disableRule:SkipUNC will cause UNC content to be included when doing a sync or migrate, because it is disabling the default rule to skip all UNC content. The list of rules can be seen in Microsoft.Web.Deployment.config.

It is also possible to create custom rules that are variations of existing rules. For example, a rule to skip all content located on drive G: would be of the same type as the SkipUNC rule in the configuration (Microsoft.Web.Deployment.SkipRuleHandler). But the absolutePath attribute would be set to “G:\\.*” instead of “\\\\.*” in the configuration file. –skip and –replace switches provided by msdeploy.exe enables creation of new rules as a command-line parameter at runtime, that are included while doing a sync or migrate operation.

4. Methods and Verbs

Methods and verbs are the operations allowed by the tool, which are called using the –verb switch at the command line. If the verb specified is not dump or sync, it is expected to be a method that is specified in the configuration. Currently, the supported methods are GetSystemInfo and GetDependencies.

Hope this helps.

Kanwal, Nina, Faith

Welcome to the Web Deployment Team blog

faith_a — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:40:00 GMT

Welcome to the Microsoft Web Deployment Team blog - we hope you will find this a helpful place to get the inside scoop plus plenty of tips and tricks from the team who is building the Web Deployment Tool for IIS.

So what is this new deployment tool? You may have read Scott Guthrie’s post about the future of ASP.NET and IIS. In the post he mentioned the roadmap for a web deployment framework, that’s us. :) In our first version, we’re releasing a command-line tool called msdeploy.exe that provides support for deploying, synchronizing and migrating IIS 6.0 and 7.0.

It supports moving configuration, content, SSL certificates and other types of data associated with a web server. You can choose to sync a single site or the entire web server. Because we know that one tool can never ‘automagically’ guess what your application relies on, we’ve tried to be pretty flexible and powerful – you can customize exactly what you want to sync using a manifest file. You can also skip sites or other objects, or you can perform regular expression replacements during a sync (like changing the home directory on the destination machine).

The goal of the tool is to help you keep servers in sync, to make deployment easier and also to help with migrating to new versions of IIS. You could use a sync on two machines in a web farm, for example. Or maybe you need to move to a new server of the same version, you can use this tool. Of course, we also enable you to do a migration from IIS 6.0 to 7.0.

You can learn more about the tool by reading our walkthroughs. Starting with the Learning Roadmap, you’ll see there is an installation walkthrough and also an introduction to the tool, which goes through operations in detail and shows you not only how the tool works, but why.

We hope you download Technical Preview 1 and provide us with feedback. We’re interested in how well the tool captures your web site/server, if there are any really important data types missing and how we can improve the overall experience.

Learn more about the tool from our walkthroughs.

Download the x86 version or the x64 version of our Technical Preview 1.

Thanks, and happy deployments!
Faith Allington, Program Manager, and the entire Web Deployment team