What is a good way to deploy ASP.NET MVC applications to IIS?

Question

My team works on a couple of ASP.NET MVC 2 applications, hosted on IIS 7 with an Oracle database. We do our database migrations manually and publish our projects directly to the web servers using Publish to File System in Visual Studio 2010.

Are there any best practices on how to release to test, stage and production environments directly from TFS? We would love to be able to automate our releases completely, including database migration scripts.

Answer 1

The preferred way to perform deployments these days seems to be WebDeploy . I believe this can be integrated into TFS , although we don't use TFS so no experience with this yet. WebDeploy is fully extendable with it's provider model .

Answer 2

You could use WebDeploy as a build task like TheCodeKing says. It works fine, we do it in our project and deploy to a dev-server and a test-server like that. The build definitions are available in the VS Team Explorer and every team member can push a build to Dev or Test.

For the database you could use the Data Dude features (or another schema compare tool) and run it via a TFS Build task (TFS 2010 supports database projects) or via the command line to compare and upgrade the database. This is of course dependent on you using the database projects.

Answer 3

Yes you will use web deploy for details information and step by step guide see the following post

http://mohamedradwan.wordpress.com/2010/10/23/auto-deploy-your-website-for-qa-with-team-build/

Thanks

M.Radwan