Publish ClickOnce app with MSBuild - msbuild

I need a way to use MSBuild to publish a ClickOnce App to multiple PublishDir(s). I have four environment (dev, qa, model, prod) and need to generate seperate ClickOnce PublishDir(s) for each because the config files are different. One of the main issues is that MSBuild doesn't create a publish.htm file. Any help would be appreciated.

I just blogged an answer to the publish.html problem, in the next couple of days I'll blog about the multiple environment issue.
http://wallism.wordpress.com/2009/12/08/clickonce-creating-publish-page-from-msbuild/

How about, as a one-time thing, manually creating the publish.htm files in the four locations?
At my company, we don't use the publish.htm file at all.
But we do have different environments, so we let the build-script change app name, update location, server uri etc pre-build and the build it with target Publish. The output files are thereafter copied to the location of the environment in question.
We are a bit old and are doing this mostly in a cmd file, but I'm sure you could have 4 different msbuild targets that does the same job.

and this solves the multiple environment issue (well, it is one way of solving the problem)
http://wallism.wordpress.com/2009/12/21/msbuild-and-multiple-environments/

var globalProperty = new Dictionary();
globalProperty.Add("Configuration", "Release");
var buildRequest = new BuildRequestData(projectFileName, globalProperty, "15.0", new String[] { "Publish" }, null);
hope this will help someone
("15.0" because I'm using visual studio 2017)

Related

TeamCity config

We're pretty new to TeamCity at work. We have a build & deployment pckage setup which is using MSBuild/MSDeploy to ship changes to our web servers. However, we have a few issues (apologies for putting a few questions on the same post). For clarification our solutions looks like so:
Project Folder
WebApp (includes .csproj file. Includes a folder called "media" - this folder is not in SVN)
Libraries (includes referenced assemblies)
Our issues:
There is a specific folder within the Libraries folder that must be copied into the bin directory after build (because of an assembly redirect). We have always used a PostBuild event, however this doesnt work in TeamCity.
The folder "media" within the WebApp folder is not included in SVN. When the TeamCity package is executed it deletes this folder. I would like to prevent TeamCity from deleting just this folder.
When we run the TeamCity task, we get an ERROR_FILE_IN_USE error for one of the files teamcity is trying to delete during the sync task. I have read about using the app_offline.htm file to combat this - but quite how Im not sure.
I'm going to guess that some of these settings can be command line parameters in the msbuild job - I think it would be better to store these in the csproj file rather than just in teamcity if it is possible?
thanks in advance
Al
A few questions on the information provided
Can you clarify what you mean by post-build command doesnt work? Does it fail or does it just not do what you expect?
How have you setup your post-build command? does it reference specific filepaths? TeamCity executes MSBuild in the same was as you could from the command line or from visual studio.
Regarding the MSDeploy folder issue, you can configure MSDeploy with a Skip Action, here's a link to another post describing how to do this
Prevent MSDeploy (selectively) from deleting folders on target IIS server
Because MSDeploy is trying to deploy into a folder being used by IIS you are also seeing the file locking issue. There are two solutions
1. Add a teamcity step to stop IIS (using PowerShell) before deploying. This will cause downtime.
2. Deploy to a different folder and then switch IIS to point to your new folder. This is a much better solution as you also have roll back.
A much easier solution to all of this is to use a Deployment Tool such as Octopus Deploy to deploy your application. You can learn more about Octopus Deploy at http://octopusdeploy.com/

Deploy multiple configurations from command line without changing project files

Please don't be too harsh, because I do not grasp this entirely correctly still, but msbuild/msdeploy is giving me some headaches lately.
Hopefully someone can provide a textual aspirin of some kind? So here is what I want to do:
I have a web application project, that has multiple configurations, thus multiple web.config-transforms.
I would like to deploy this project from command line.
I would rather not want to modify its project file. (I want to be able to do this for several web applications so as least as editing as possible is much appreciated)
I would like to be able to build it only once and then deploy the different configurations from it.
So far I deployed from command line using something like this:
msbuild D:\pathToFile\DeployVariation01.csproj
/p:Configuration=Debug;
Platform=AnyCpu;
DeployOnBuild=true;
DeployTarget=MSDeployPublish;
MSDeployServiceURL="localhost";
DeployIisAppPath="DeployApp/DeployThis01";
MSDeployPublishMethod=InProc
And this performs just what I want, except it only deploys the "Debug"-Configuration.
How can I, with minimal adjustments, make it deploy my other configurations as well?
I was thinking maybe I could build a package that includes all my configurations and then deploy from that and decide "while deploying" which configuration to deploy?
Unfortuanetly I am pretty much stuck here, the approaches I have read about all seem to require some modifications to project files, is there a way around that?
UPDATE:
I am still not really where I want to be here :).
But I looked into this PackageWeb-approach (also interesting video about that here) and it seems pretty nice; I can now build a package that includes all my transforms and then deploy from that as often as I want into multiple configurations.
One thing that I dislike about this is that I have to store my password in plain text into the generated parameters file for the powershell script, does someone know a way around this, I really would rather have that being an encrypted password.
Also other approaches to solve my original problem are still appreciated.
I am working on the same problem and am taking two paths using Microsoft Web Deploy or MSDeploy which is now in version 3.0.
I first compile the project using MSBUILD using the Package target passing in system.configuration, system.packagelocation. The Package Target generates a set of package files including a {PackageName}.SetParameters.xml file. The SetParameters.xml file by default allows on-publish changes to ConnectionStrings without recompiling when using msdeploy.exe to publish the file. The publish transformation process can also be customized by adding a parameters.xml file to the process defining additional parameterized web.config settings which can be changed at deploy time.
After the initial build I use the {PackageName}.deploy.cmd file generated by MSBUILD during the Package process to deploy the package to the target website. The Package process essentially duplicates the process you are currently doing from MSBUILD in that I can publish one Build-Configuration web.config transform from one compile. The process provides a consistent deployment process that can target remote servers from a central CI environment, which is great from a purely deployment process. The PackageBuild/Deploy process is parameterized within TeamCity, requiring changes to only a few parameters to setup a new deployment.
Like you, I cannot, however, compile a single version of code and deploy to multiple servers using the process as it exists today - which is my current focus. I want to parameterize the transform in a Continuous Deployment, build-once-deploy-many pattern to Dev, QA, User Testing, Staging, and Production.
I anticipate using one of two methods:
Create a Parameters.xml file for each project defining the variable deployment parameters along with a custom {ServerName}.SetParameters.xml for each target deployment, both to be used in conjunction with msdeploy.exe.
a. I am not sure defining a parameters.xml is a flexible enough process for my needs as the current project inserts and removes a variable number of web.config settings. Implementing a parameters file incorporating all of the variables could be too complex for my taste. I would also end up creating all of the target transformations, instead of the current developers initiated process. Not ideal.
I am following up on very recent updates to VS2012 Web Tools 2012.2 which allow tying a web.config transform to the publish profiles (profile.pubxml) now stored under SolutionName/Properties/PublishProfiles in VS2012.
VS2012 release 2012.2 adds the capability to create a second transform tied to the publish profile. The resulting transform process first runs the build configuration transformation, followed by the publish transformation, i.e. Release Transform followed by TargetServer Transform. Sayed Hashimi has a great YouTube video demonstrating the entire process using MSBUILD.
What is not entirely clear is whether the second transform is supported separately from the build using MSDeploy in a Continuous Deployment, build-once-deploy-many Pattern, or if the publish transformation is only supported during a separate Package/Build for each target transformation.
Option 1 will definitely work for some environments and was my first plan for tackling a Continuous Deployment process. I would much rather use Web Transforms to accomplish the process if possible.
An outside third possibility is using one of several CodePlex commandline projects that are capable of transforming web.config using the XDT transform engine. Unfortunately, using these tools would mean splicing the results into the Build/Package MSBUILD process in order to get the resulting web.config transformation into the deployment package - something I've not yet been successful in accomplishing. Sayed Hashimi also has a PackageWeb project from 2012 that might work as well. I am hoping his more recent work replaces the need for the extra steps involved in the packageweb solution.
Let me know if you decide on a solution - as I am definitely interested.

Build in TFS with multiple project is not taking the correct transformation web config

I have a solution in VS2010 and it has three project, two of these projects have web config file, the projects have web config transformation for each environment (dev, test and prod).
At the process for TFS build option, I have the at the MSBuild Arguments : /p:DeployOnBuild=True
Everything looks good, the drop folder, the zip files and all structure for the final deployment. The issue I am facing the web config for test and prod is not created correctly after the final deployment, I could see at the drop folders the file projectName.SetParameters.xml, it contains the values for development when the build has been QUEUE for Test and Prod. One of the project has the correct web config (test and prod) but the other project has always the dev webconfig.
Is it a bug in the MS Build? What am I missing in the build parameters?
When I create a build deployment package the web config transformation creates the correct web config file, no issues with this process, but I do not want to use build deployment package to deploy my solution.
Any help will be appreciated.
Thank you.
In your Build Definition you probably defined the Configurations to use. Part of that also defines something like Any CPU or x86. As it turns out the solution the Platform "Any CPU" has a space where in the project files the Platform Any CPU does not have a space.
I found the best way to get around this was to leave the Platform blank and only put in the configuration name. VS will pop up a warning letting you know that there is data missing, you can just hit "Yes" to save it anyways. Alternatively you can just type in your configurations like the following |Release,|Debug.
The pattern is [PlatformName]|[ConfigurationName],[PlatformName]|[ConfigurationName],...

What parameters does TeamCity pass to MSBuild under the covers?

I just downloaded TeamCity 7 today and decided to get it up and running for my Azure solution. I am not trying to do anything fancy (yet) and started with a very basic command line build:
msbuild /t:Publish /p:Configuration=Release;TargetProfile=Production;PublishDir=S:\HoursTracker\Deployments
This builds successfully and produces a package that looks like this*:
I then attempted to configure TeamCity in an identical fashion:
This builds successfully and produces a package that looks like this*:
What I don't understand is why there is such a huge discrepancy in the size of the MVC project. Publishing directly from Visual Studio produces the exact same result as my MSBuild command so I'm convinced that TeamCity is the odd man out. Since I assume TeamCity is not broken, can someone please educate me on how to properly configure it so that I get the expected output?
*I have renamed the package files with .zip so that the details were viewable for this post.
Ming's answer helped me solve the mystery. After inspecting the contents of the zip files, I discovered the difference was that my MSBuild package contained bin and obj folders and the TeamCity package did not.
After making this discovery, I realized that I could specify multiple targets to MSBuild and prepended "Clean" to my targets switch like so:
msbuild /t:Clean;Publish /p:Configuration=Release;TargetProfile=Production;PublishDir=S:\HoursTracker\Deployments
As expected, this removed those folders. So apparently, TeamCity specifies "Clean" implicitly for you. Mystery solved.
Windows Azure packages may be larger than we expect. You can rename the cssx file to zip and you will find out what’s inside the package. In addition to the web application’s usual files, there’re a bunch of Windows Azure files. For example, if you enable diagnostics, you will see a diagnostics folder, where you’ll find files used by Windows Azure diagnostics runtime.
Best Regards,
Ming Xu.
Why you specified x64 for msbuild runner? Try selecting tools version as well. You have not specified /p:Platform parameter. Does publish task involve rebuild?
TeamCity starts msbuild with number of /p: parameters taken from " properties and environment variables " section, plus some well-known parameters like configuration name or project name.

Problems with MSBuild OutputPath and OutDir in TFS2010

We have a very large solution (some 300+) projects and we are trying to build it via MSBuild on TFS2010.
We can build it via MSBuild on all out development machines, and are in the process of adopting TFS.
The structure of our code is like so:
bin\Client
bin\Server
Framework\ClientFramework.csproj
Modules\Module1\Project1
Modules\Module2\Project2
etc.
Each project has a relative OutputPath which builds the code to the bin Client or Server directory. So for example, Project1.csproj has an OutputPath of "..\..\bin\Client".
We seem to be having a problem that in TFS MSBuild the OutDir is set to a Fixed Path:
C:\Builds\MyProject\Binaries\
So things are getting confusing when resolving the relative OutputPath on top of the OutDir
ClientFramework goes to C:\Builds\MyProject\Binaries\..\bin\Client
Project1 goes to C:\Builds\MyProject\Binaries\..\..\bin\Client
etc.
We also have some Post build events that copy some 3rd Party dll's to the bin folders, these paths cannot be resolved properly either.
I think the solution we are after is to build everything to our existing bin\Client, bin\Server structure and then move the Folders from bin to Binaries.
Any ideas on how to accomplish this or how we should be working, are appreciated, but updating our existing projects might prove problematic, as it all works with VS, developer command line builds and with CC.net.
Since this is first link that pops up with a Google search of "TFS OutDir", I must provide a newer solution. I spent an entire day playing around with OutDir, OutputPath, and overriding them with TeamBuildOutDir. A better solution is to set the MSBuild property GenerateProjectSpecificOutputFolder. It comes with .NET 4.5. More info here: http://blog.codeassassin.com/2012/05/10/override-the-tfs-team-build-outdir-property-net-4-5/
I found the answer on MSDN : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff977206.aspx