IIS’ Web Deployment Tool Beta 2 Released
The Web Deployment team had a big ‘coming out’ party yesterday at the PDC and announced immediate availability of a new Beta of the Microsoft Web Deployment Tool.
MS Deploy - Fundamentals
If you aren’t familiar with this tool yet, you’re going to want to take the time to browse the documents and give it a try. It is one of the fundamental building blocks that IIS will be building on the next several years. In it’s current beta form, it can be used to:
- Migrate entire servers or individual sites from one machine to another (IIS6 –> IIS7)
- Sync Servers, Sites, and Applications (IIS6 –> IIS6, and IIS7 –> IIS7)
- Create offline packages that can be used as backups, version control, and deployment units
New Beta Features
The new beta has several new and exciting features you’ll want to check out. The new release includes an all-new IIS Manager extension that enables you to create, and install packages from within IIS Manager. Imagine being able to right click on your Web site, create an offline ‘package’ of the site and all of it’s configuration, dependencies, etc., and then roll it out over any number of servers, locally or remote!
The beta also provides support for ‘delegated’ publishing, which enables Administrators to grant control to developers and Web site owners to do the packaging and publishing without being a machine administrator. This is going to be a huge boon for Shared Hosters especially, allowing richer application publishing than ever before. DiscountASP.net, one of our close hosting partners, is offering 2000 free accounts as part of a limited Beta which allows you to try out this new functionality – sign-up today, availability is limited.
The new beta also includes support for SQL Server, enabling you to include SQL databases (Schema + Data) as part of your deployment, both live server <-> sync as well as offline packaging!
And lots of bug fixes, performance improvements, etc. Please note: the last beta was released as a “GoLive” release, which means we felt it was ready for production use. This Beta includes so many new features for the first time that we have not marked it as “GoLive”. The migration and sync features should work as well, if not better than the previous release, but the new features are still under testing and we need your feedback to feel confident they are ready.
Visual Studio 10 Integration!
The team also announced integration with Visual Web Developer Express as part of the upcoming Visual Studio 10 release which will enable developers to create application packages at development/build time, which can then be deployed directly from within VS (one-click publishing to remote servers!) or offline as part of a staging process. Developers and IT Pros can rejoice with that one: no more 10-page instruction-custom-script-manual-deployments, do it all automatically with a perfectly repeatable deployment package created within VS using MSDeploy!
Thanks!
This beta release is a huge next step for MS Deploy, and the team worked very hard (including some late nights and weekends :) to get it ready for PDC. Please give it a try and help us make it better by giving us feedback! Some important links:
Web Deployment Tool forum: http://forums.iis.net/1144.aspx
Web Deployment Team blog: http://blogs.iis.net/msdeploy/
Downloads
x86 version: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=109365
x64 version: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=109366
Quick Starts:
1. Web Deployment Tool Overview (overview of the features)
2. Installing the Web Deployment Tool (installation and remote service options)
3. Create a Package (creating a package including content, databases and more)
4. Install a Package (deploying the package to a local or remote machine)
5. Configure the Delegation Service (enable deployment to an IIS 7.0 server)
More quick guides can be found at the Web Deployment Tool main page.