Microsoft Web Deployment Team Blog : Migration

Web Deployment Tool 1.0 has shipped!

faith_a — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 18:30:00 GMT

After 2 years of development and lots of customer feedback, we are proud to announce that the Web Deployment Tool has shipped the RTW of our version 1.0!

In version 1.0, we have the following components:

Powerful APIs that allow you to deploy, sync and migrate web applications on IIS, and perform granular operations like changing IP bindings, site names and changing file structures on the fly. You can also create a new provider to sync a new type of resource.
Command-line tool (msdeploy.exe) that allows you to perform all the same operations available in the APIs.
User interface built into IIS Manager 7.0 on Vista, Windows 2008 and Windows 7 that allows you to create packages (zip files containing IIS config, content, databases and more) and install them.
Delegation framework and service built into IIS 7.0 that allows you to delegate tasks like installing applications and databases without requiring them to be administrators on the box.
Remote administrative service that works on IIS 6.0 and 7.0 to allow server-level synchronization by administrators.

So, what can you do with these components?

Migrate Web applications from IIS 6.0. Simplify the planning of your IIS 6.0 to IIS 7.0 migrations by determining incompatibilities and previewing the proposed changes before starting the process. Learning about any potential issues in advance gives you the chance to take corrective measures and simplifies migration.
Synchronize your server farm. Synchronize between IIS 6.0 > IIS 6.0 or IIS 7.0, and only sync the differences. The tool simplifies the synchronization process by automatically determining the configuration, content and certificates to be synchronized for a Web site. Optionally, specify additional resources for sync, including databases, COM objects, GAC assemblies and registry settings.
Package, archive and deploy Web applications. Package configuration and content of Web applications, including databases, and then use the packages for storage or redeployment. These packages can be deployed using IIS Manager without requiring administrative privileges. The tool integrates with Visual Studio 2010 to help developers streamline the deployment of Web applications to the Web server. The tool also integrates with the Web Platform Installer to allow you to simply and easily install community web applications.

What are some of the new features in RTW?

Brand new UI to create those server-side delegation rules, instead of directly editing config.
Delete and recycle application support inside IIS Manager, even as a remote non-admin user.
A new temporary agent that doesn't require you to have any services installed on your remote machines, but instead temporarily adds the agent and then removes it after sync.
A rule to avoid overwriting newer files on the destination with a new rule.
A rule to avoid syncing based on time stamp differences and instead perform a checksum comparison.
A new provider (runCommand) allows you to run a batch file, script or exe as part of synchronization. This is convenient if you need to net start a service, for example.
Lots of enhancements to our parameterization, including the ability to validate what the user enters, and provide a parameters.xml file with answers to parameters instead of passing them one at a time in the command-line.

Some of our favorite scenarios include:

Create application packages that contain all of the IIS config, content, databases and more, including parameters so that when the server admin installs the package, they are prompted to fill in parameters like SQL Server connection string.
Insert a few XML files into your existing application zip file (such as DotNetNuke or WordPress) and make your application work seamlessly in control panels or through the Web Platform installer.
Build an automated deployment system using our APIs, cmd-line or the Visual Studio integration, so that you can deploy daily from test to staging to production.
Allow your developers to directly deploy to the staging server without admin intervention, and lock down exactly what they can change (mark a folder as an app but not change the site's binding).
Replace Application Center with a set of scripts or programs that call our APIs or cmd-line to sync multiple servers in a web farm.
Build a roll-back solution by taking a package of your live app, deploying the app_v2 package created in your dev environment, and checking for failures. In case of failures, automatically apply the v1 package or backup that you took.

But there are a lot more tasks and scenarios you can accomplish, we'd love to hear about what you're doing...

Go get our 1.0 release at http://www.iis.net/webdeploymenttool and let us know what you think!

Happy deployments,
Faith Allington and the entire Web Deployment team

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!

Microsoft.com uses the Web Deployment Tool

faith_a — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:20:00 GMT

The folks at Microsoft.com used the Web Deployment Tool to perform a migration of an IIS 6.0 server to IIS 7.0. They published a whitepaper describing their experiences with Tech Preview 1, available at their new operations site.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/mscomops/cc424869.aspx

BTW, the new operations site also happens to have some interesting articles about other IIS 7.0 functionality, such as how they are using delegated configuration and streamlining their installations. I think we can expect to see more whitepapers in the future.

Enjoy!

Thanks,
-faith