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create smart device cab through msbuild
I know MSBUild struggles to build some Setup Projects and the advice here is to use WiX to achieve the goal.
however my google-fu turns up nothing in the way of indicating if Msbuild can cope with VDD projects however from looking at the format of the file I suspect this is a complete no go.
has anyone done something similar? if so by what means did you automatically build these projects
Error Message when attempting to run with Msbuild
“The project file could not be loaded. Data at the root level is invalid.”
One work around I've used to automate Windows Installer project builds on a build server is to fire off a devenv commandline to build the installer projects. We since migrated the installers to WIX.
This solution does, however, require Visual Studio to be installed on the build server, and basically starts up the whole VS environment (non visisble though) and asks it to build.
Looks like my question may be a duplicate of the this, so more than happy to have this closed. Installing dev studio on a build agent seems to me to defeat the purpose of having a clean build agent?
Related
We have an MSBuild task that runs on our server after pulling down code as an automated build server.
Our problem is that when we deploy the site from the output of MSBuild, there are a few files included that shouldn't be and one (maybe more) that aren't included.
These are the files that are included that shouldn't
mscorlib.dll
normidna.nlp
normnfc.nlp
normnfd.nlp
normnfk.nlp
normnfkd.nlp
And this is the one file that I'm aware of that's missing
App_global.asax.compiled
The server it's building on is Windows Server 2008 64-bit
I'm using TeamCity to run the builds if this makes a difference
Any other details that are needed, please feel free to comment
With regard to the files that are included that should not be, this question seems to have the answer which is that the build server does not have the .NET framework SDK installed.
As for the missing App_global.asax.compiled the final answer posted in this thread suggests that if you have a web application project rather than a web site project then you won't get one of these files.
Our main website is a collection of 10 separate ASP.NET projects and applications. At the moment, to do a complete deployment onto a fresh server involves running ten separate msdeploy jobs; each application is built, configured (using config transforms) and packaged, but we don't have any solution for deploying all the packages as a single operation.
I can see several possibilities that might work in this scenario, but would love to hear from anybody who has succeeded - or failed - in setting up something similar:
A folder full of packages and deploy.cmd scripts, with a "master script" that will call each individual app script in turn and deploy that app to the target server.
Using a staging server where we deploy the latest build of each package from TeamCity using the production configuration, but then use msdeploy to capture that server into a single enormous msdeploy ZIP package, which is then deployed onto each production server as a single msdeploy step.
Creating a single, enormous Visual Studio solution that references EVERY project in our codebase (perhaps via svn:externals?), compiles and cross-references them ALL, and hence supports using a single msbuild job to create a huge monolithic package containing our entire codebase, built from the latest revision in source control and configured for the target environment.
I've studied Troy Hunt's excellent "You're Deploying it Wrong" series, and Scott Hanselman's "Web Deployment Made Awesome" article, but I think I'm looking for something a step beyond either of these approaches that incorporates multiple projects and applications without necessarily building them from source in a single step - any ideas?
We had a very similar scenario in our company, and we created an installation package using WIX. Our config transform happens at installation time, so now we create a single build, then deploy that to each server via an MSI install package. WIX is very flexible, but also has a steep learning curve. We modify our configs using our own custom action, but it could be done other ways.
We use Team Foundation Server and MSBuild to do our builds. This is pretty straight forward, but did take some work to set up correctly with as many projects and solutions as we had.
Other options we looked into, and even tried were:
InstallShield - Not flexible enough.
Writing our own C# Install - WIX already thought of everything we
were trying to accomplish so why reinvent the wheel?
Just saying to heck with it all and installing things manually - 2 or
3 months of development time in WIX and MSBuild have easily paid for
the hours we would have spent of the last year doing things manually.
I think the deployment tools built into Visual Studio were designed for a single application with just a few deployments. It sounds like you need external tools, and development effort, to get your deployments quicker, and eliminate the need for doing things manually. That's why we invested in the above solution, and it has really paid off.
I'll pick Installshield.
Installshield latest versions support creating webdeploy packages.
You can define the IIS configurations for all apps in a single project and create releases if you want to create packages by separate or one single release for all web apps.
Installshield project has an object model where you can automate basically every task from build scripts, also the projects are simple xml files that you can also modify in automation scripts if required
Developers can modify update WixXML projects by separate and you can add those projects builds as merge modules to your installshield projects through your build scripts with some little tweaks to the installshield project xml (at least in 2011 version, this part is not supported by installshield but can be done)
You don't even need to modify Visual Studio Projects for groups of web apps that follow a same pattern, neither manually modify your installshield project to add new web apps for these cases, you can create packages for new web apps without intervention setting one time your build scripts for the installshield project automation task based on the root VS build output
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.
A similar question was asked and answered about a year ago, but was either a different issue (everything was in beta) or misdiagnosed. It's located here: MSbuild task fails because "Any CPU" solution is built out of order.
My issue is that I have a wix installer project, and after upgrading to Tfs2010 on monday, the build fails on linking because it can't find the build product of the Wpf application in the project. After some digging, it's because it hasn't been built yet. Building in Vs2010 works as normal. The wix project is set to depend on the Wpf project, and when viewing Project Build Order in the IDE, everything looks as normal.
The problem was originally encountered with only two platform definitions in the solution; x86 and x64. There are also two flavors, Debug and Release, and TFSBuild.proj is set to build all four combinations. There was no occurence of AnyCPU anywhere. Per the referenced question above, I tried changing the Wpf project to use AnyCPU so that it would be built first. At this point, the wix project used the exact configuration and the Wpf project used the flavor with AnyCPU. However, doing so didn't seem to change anything.
I'm using the Tfs2010 RTM, Vs2010 RTM, and the most recent version of Wix, which at the time of this writing is 3.5.1602.0, from 2010-04-02. Anyone else running into this?
2010-04-27: After a fair amount of digging, and reproducing on a cloned VM build machine, I believe I know what's going on and also what's failing, but I don't quite know how to fix it.
The situation is that this bug seems to exhibit symptoms based on pure luck-of-the-draw project ordering in the solution file. It appears as if the solution file will just blindly build the projects in the order they appear, relying on its ability to detect unbuilt references and build them on demand when needed.
In my particular solution file, my Wix project was ordered before my Wpf application project. This resulted in the Wix project being built first, and while the dependency on the Wpf project was detected correctly, the actual MSBuild task was skipped because of the undefined $(BuildProjectReferences) variable I mention a couple of comments down from the main post in this thread. With MSBuild verbosity still on diagnostic, BuildProjectReferences can be seen as undefined building the Wix project, and it can be seen defined as true upon building the Wpf project within the task to build the Wix project. Yet, when tested, it evaluates undefined again, the task is skipped, and the Wix build fails because it can't find the build output of the unbuilt Wpf project.
So bottom line: project dependency is skipped because of bad $(BuildProjectReferences) variable. Interestingly, this variable is present only in the Wix2010.targets file, and not in wix.targets; I guess that's why this is just showing up after I installed Tfs2010 and Vs2010.
The solution: How do I make sure that BuildProjectReferences is passed along correctly to the subsequent MSBuild tasks? Is there something special with variable scoping going on?
2010-09-14: A bug was opened for this issue in the WiX toolset: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=642714&aid=2990231&group_id=105970 and fixed a while ago. Hopefully, this is no longer an issue. If so, please do open a new bug.
To address your comment directly, nothing in my solution has an AnyCPU configuration in their build files. I created the AnyCPU configurations only to test the solution suggested by the thread I linked to in my original post. After it didn't work, I removed the AnyCPU configurations again.
Furthermore, the projects are in the same solution file, however in separate solution folders (interface folder, installer folder) if that matters.
Interestingly enough, I was going to make a small sandbox example so that I could illustrate the problem I was having, however after creating my tiny sample solution, I couldn't get the error to reproduce. This makes me think that perhaps this is a result of using a team project that was upgraded from a Tfs2008 team project rather than one that was created fresh in Tfs2010. I may try branching my project into a new one to test this theory if I can't figure out why the test solution works.
p.s. also, I'm new to stackoverflow--why on earth are comments limited in length if the "answer your own question" workflow is intended only to provide concrete answers?
So I threw the build verbosity up to diagnostic and read through it today, and one line in particular stood out to me:
Task "MSBuild" skipped, due to false condition; ('#(_ProjectReferenceWithConfiguration)'!='' and '$(BuildingInsideVisualStudio)' != 'true' and '$(BuildProjectReferences)' == 'true' and '#(_MSBuildProjectReferenceExistent)' != '') was evaluated as ('..\WpfApp\WpfApp.csproj'!='' and '' != 'true' and '' == 'true' and '..\WpfApp\WpfApp.csproj' != '').
This was seen as my installer project was attempting to build my wpf project since the wpf project is referenced. In particular, for some reason $(BuildProjectReferences) is evaluating to '' when I'm fairly sure it should be 'true'.
However earlier in the log, at the beginning of the MSBuild task for the WpfApp project, I saw this:
Task "MSBuild" (TaskId:15)
...
Initial Properties:
...
BuildProjectReferences = true
So the property was indeed correct up until the beginning of the task, but then was apparently overwritten? I'm sort of unclear as to how these properties get set.
Its a bug, a bug, a bug. I don't know, who is responsible, but here's a working dirty filthy hack:
Open your .sln file in notepad.
Find your wix projects in the list of projects.
Cut them out, and paste them back after all other projects are listed.
Cry in the shower as you try to scrub the dirty off, only to emerge hours later, rubbed raw and still with the stench of filth clinging to you like corpse's skin.
Following Rob Mensching's edit of my original post, it seems that this has indeed been fixed in WiX 3.6.0917.0 at the latest.
I was seeing this problem (wix 3.7 not finding the dependent project output) in my local and TFS builds (for both VS2010 and VS2012).
I finally got around it by setting the msbuild property /m:1 to only use a single build process. I set /m to allow msbuild to figure out how many processes it could use to simultaneously build with.
I faced with a same problem today and find a solution like this:
Open your solution file on notepad the find your setup project and change postProject setting. This will tell msbuild this project should wait another project to build. I don't know why but it is not added by default.
Project("{GUID}") = "MyInstaller", "MyInstallerPath", "{Installer Project GUID}"
ProjectSection(ProjectDependencies) = postProject
{Prebuild Project GUID} = {Prebuild Project GUID}
EndProjectSection
EndProject
'Prebuild Project GUID' is the number on the right of the project that you want to install.
TFS uses a set of properties to control the names of the solutions and configurations to build ( iterate through ). For each combination of solution and configuration it then uses the project dependencies / build order to control the order of the projects getting built. It's possible that your EXE/DLL's are AnyCPU and that your WiX is x86 and that although the WiX has a dependency on the EXE/DLL the x86 is built before your AnyCPU. Or maybe they are even in different solutions so it's kind of hard to tell without looking at your source but that's basically how it works.
What we did is to first report the bug to wix and then we found your question.
We solved the problem on our side by saying that, by default, the wix project will build the references. We updated the file C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\WiX\v3.5\wix2010.targets by setting <BuildProjectReferences>True</BuildProjectReferences> in the project which set the path. So, yes, we have done this manually ; we have reported the bug as well as our fix.
I am working on a web application in VS 2008. To compile the applicaiton I go to Build in Visual Studio and click on Build Solution and when i have to deploy the site I click on Publish and it publishes the site to a directory.
Now my question is when do we use this msbuild file? what exactly this file does for Us?
Thanks.
You use a Build file when you have to do a series of operations that you want to do before or after compiling. This is used in most of the big projects where there will be other things (examples for other things are given below) that needs to be done and through MS build they will automated.
Examples of things that can be done with build :
Running Unit tests
Functional testing
Static Code analysis and reports
Packaging as an installer