Wix binaries in TFS preview - wix

I want to add WIX binaries in TFS preview website how to do that
I have vs 2012 along with build on tfs 2012 in windows server 2012

Here are the specific steps to achieve what you are looking for.
Integrate the WiX toolset into your source control - that link gives you the steps to use the binaries.zip file to get the tools and check them into your build system.
Suppress ICE validation in your .wixproj - the TFS build servers do not allow validation to work so set the SuppressValidation Property in MSBuild to true.
<PropertyGroup>
<SuppressValidation>true</SuppressValidation>
</PropertyGroup>
Manually run validation - validation is like static analysis, it will find problems before you ship to your customers. So, after each build, use smoke.exe to run validation on your MSI on a local server:
smoke.exe path\to\your.msi

It seems WiX is now preinstalled on the hosted TFS build servers. However, ICE validation still fails due to environmental constraints.
If you use Votive to create your .SLN/.WIXPROJ/.WXS and go into project properties and disable validation, it should build without doing anything else.
That said, disabling validation is a non-starter for me. Therefore, I'd suggest setting up your own build server and installing WiX 3.7 on it.

Related

Getting SlowCheetah to transform files on Visual Studio Online

I've looked over several suggestions for getting SlowCheetah transforms to work with Visual Studio Online's build system, but nothing seems definitive, especially for the Visual Studio 2015 world.
I have a web project with both build configurations and publish profiles in place. If I'm using the one-click publish, everything works as expected; first the build config transform fires, then the publish profile config transform. However, on VSO, only the web.config is transformed, and then only for the build configuration.
The goal would be to provide the build definition on VSO with the build configuration and publish profile to use (which I know can be provided via MSBuild) and trigger the transforms to work as appropriate. I'm using the new VSO build definitions that are done online through the web interface (not the XAML ones), and the good news is this has an option to restore NuGet packages automatically (which has been one of the issues in the past). It looks like other MSBuild steps could also be added, so maybe there's a way to trigger the process after the build or something.
Has anyone gotten this to work properly? Thanks.
I did a quick test on this but didn't see any issue.
The screenshot for my project:
And the screenshot for my build definition:
After the web project is published with these settings, I can get the "Web.config" and "XMLFile1.xml" transformed with the "edd" profile and "XMLFile2.xml" transformed with build configuration.

Cannot analyze multple VS Solutions via SonarQube integrated with TFS 2012 build

I followed the instructions on the "SonarQube Setup Guide for .NET Users" (http://redirect.sonarsource.com/doc/sq-setup-guide-for-dotnet-users.html) to setup a SonarQube 5.1.2 server and integrated with TFS 2012. Even though the document describes how to integrate SonarQube with TFS 2013 XAML builds and TFS 2015 Build vNext, I was able to somewhat integrate it with TFS 2012 XAML build. Here are the sequence of steps in the TFS 2012 XAML.
call InvokeProcess build activity (with WorkingDirecotry set to the directory containing the VS Solution file to be compiled such as C:\Builds\...\ClassLibrary3 to call MSBuild.SonarQube.Runner.exe begin ... (MSBuild SonarQube Runner version 1.0.1)
Call Microsoft MSBuild activity to compile 1 or more VS Solutions such as C:\Builds\...\ClassLibrary3\ClassLibrary3.sln
call InvokeProcess build activity (with WorkingDirecotry set to the directory containing the VS Solution file previously compiled) to call MSBuild.SonarQube.Runner.exe end
The problem is that I can only analyze one compiled VS Solution even if multiple VS Solutions are compiled. This is because the working directory must be the same when calling MSBuild.SonarQube.Runner.exe and MSBuild. The MSBuild activity's working directory is set to where the VS Solution file is located but will differ for each VS Solution compiled but MSBuild.SonarQube.Runner.exe can only specify one working directory. Is there a way to analyze multiple VS Solutions? I don't think there's a way to change MSBuild activity's working directory is there? Thx.
The best way to proceed is be have one project in SonarQube for each of your solution, and use the Portfolio Management plugin (commercial) to perform the aggregation of all these projects on the server side to offer the big picture. See http://www.sonarsource.com/products/plugins/governance/portfolio-management/ & on Nemo how it integrates all Apache projects for example: http://nemo.sonarqube.org/dashboard/index?id=Apache
Another way would be to craft a *.proj file that will include all other projects to build.
Another way, which I wouldn't recommend, is to invoke MSBuild.SonarQube.Runner begin for every solution that you build, then movie the contents of every .sonarqube\out folders to a single one (aggregate it), and call MSBuild.SonarQube.Runner end from that location.
Another way would be to upgrade to TFS 2015, and check how its MSBuild task behaves.

How to define WIX agent requirement in TeamCity?

I have add a WIX installer project to solution in Visual Studio 2013. The project is built with every commit on TeamCity. There are several build agents connected to TeamCity cloud, but only some have WIX installed.
Usually I would add the build agent requirement, so only the computer with WIX installed is selected for automated build.
What requirement should I select? Is there some environment variable I could use after WIX is installed?
I know I can set the environment variable manually on every computer I install WIX, but this is not nice solution for me.
There's a system environment variable called 'WIX', which holds the path WiX Toolset is installed to. It is created during WiX Toolset installation.
However, there might be a better way that avoids setting up any build agent requirements. Take a look at this article that explains how to integrate WiX into daily builds. Basically, it suggests committing the required binaries along with the source code of your app.
Both approaches have pros and cons, it's your choice.
The agent need to be restarted after installing WIX. Then there will be
env.WIX
requirment in the Teamcity.

ClickOnce deployment minumum required version auto-increment with MSBuild

We current do manual builds/publish from Visual Studio 2010 and we require users to always be running the latest version (check before startup and minimum required version set). I am working on scripting our deployment out and have no issues using msbuild to build/publish. However, I have not found a way to auto-increment the minimum required version when msbuild runs. What are my options to automatically bump this when publishing via msbuild?
I did see quite a few articles on this topic here, but they seemed to be specific to VS and not MSBuild.
Updating the MinimumRequiredVersion Automatically
Introduction to Project Editor
In Solution Explorer, right click on your project and select unload project.
Once the project has become unavailable, right click again and select edit <project_name>.<lang> proj.
Introduction to MSBuild
Properties use key/value pairs to extract information
Using the property name as an alias, you can use $(OutputPath) to obtain the value for the element <OutputPath>.\bin</OutputPath>
We’ll use the following properties generated for a ClickOnce deployment
<MinimumRequiredVersion>1.0.0.6</MinimumRequiredVersion>
<ApplicationRevision>7</ApplicationRevision>
<ApplicationVersion>1.0.0.%2a</ApplicationVersion>
MSBuild Tasks can be specified in the project (*.proj) file and invoked during a build event.
FormatVersion is a built-in task for .NET 4.0 and later that formats the ApplicationVersion and ApplicationRevision into a single version number.
Implementation
Copy and Paste the following code into the opened project file as a child element to the root <Project> element.
<Target Name="AutoSetMinimumRequiredVersion" BeforeTargets="GenerateDeploymentManifest">
<FormatVersion Version="$(ApplicationVersion)" Revision="$(ApplicationRevision)">
<Output PropertyName="MinimumRequiredVersion" TaskParameter="OutputVersion" />
</FormatVersion>
<FormatVersion Version="$(ApplicationVersion)" Revision="$(ApplicationRevision)">
<Output PropertyName="_DeploymentBuiltMinimumRequiredVersion" TaskParameter="OutputVersion" />
</FormatVersion>
</Target>
This code will take ApplicationVersion and ApplicationRevision as parameters in the Format Version task and will save the output by overwriting the MinimumRequiredVersion with the full publish version.
Save and reload your project. Every ClickOnce deployment will now automatically update to the most recently published version.
Many thanks to Kev for their answer which I have basically rehashed here with a little bit of added clarification for any beginners. Here's a blog post I made about the issue that expands even more on my answer here.
Right now, I'm leaning towards updating the MinimumRequiredVersion via a custom command-line utility that will simply read in the project file and increment it. It's the only option I've come up with for scripting out my build.
I'm not sure if you're going about this the best possible way.
I would recommend using a continuous integration (CI) server like Team City that is responsible for deployments. If having the latest version of the source code is a requirement for publishing, then that is probably something you should build into a well-tested CI build configuration, and take away from the hands of the potentially forgetful/occasionally error-prone users.
Since you are wanting to publish using MSBuild and not Visual Studio, I assume you are publishing from a build server or using some sort of script. You can use the Set-ProjectFilesClickOnceVersion PowerShell script to both set the ClickOnce Application Version as well as force the Minimum Required Version to be the latest version. You would want to do this before running MSBuild. My blog describes in more detail how to setup your build server to accommodate publishing ClickOnce applications.

Problems with WiX and Visual Studio web deployment project

We want to create an .MSI package from a web deployment project in Visual Studio 2008.
Now we want to use continuous integration and we would need the .MSI package build in the nightly builds.
Till now we used standard Visual Studio Web Setup project, but this is not compatible with the MSBuild. So we decided to use WiX.
The problem is that I have not found any good tutorial/documentation about this.
Is there a way to do a WiX installer package from a web deployment project? If yes, how?
Also, I tried to use heat.exe to create the XML for the WiX project .wxs file, but it seems that heat.exe doesn't recognize the web deployment project format.
Thank you for your responses.
Regards,
V.
I wrote a blog post about this recently - http://www.chrissurfleet.co.uk/post/2011/07/01/Using-Packaged-Project-Output-in-WiX-and-Visual-Studio.aspx
In short, its fairly easy to use msbuild to package up your web app and then pass it to heat to generate your installer from.
Hope this helps.
You've probably long since found a solution for this, but to elaborate on Tom Cabanski's answer, you can invoke Visual Studio to build the msi on the command line using "devenv.com" via an external process from within your build. It's not a pretty as using msbuild, but it gets the job done. Below is an example of how to invoke Visual Studio:
"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.com" your.sln /build Release
Where your.sln is the solution file for the solution you wish to build, and Release is the configuration you wish to build, ensuring that the configuration you choose actually builds the vdproj project.
Following the successful execution, you can grab the msi from the appropriate configuration's bin, and do what you want with it.
I'd appreciate your response to this with your findings/approach, as I'm trying to decide whether to adopt WiX or InstallShield as the approach to building msi's for Web Applications within TFS Build, or to continue with the approach I just described. I haven't had to opportunity to try WiX out, and my very limited exposure to InstallShield suggests that this is far to involved for my need, which is to produce a simple deployment aid for some relatively straight-forward web applications to the company intranet via TFS Build.
We used WIX on the installers for our last couple of projects and ended up regretting it. I would stick with the VS built-in projects and just invoke the VS IDE from the command line in the CI build.