We have for a while been building various web projects with AzureDevops and self hosted build agents.
Today I had to add a new build, consisting of a windows service written in .net core 3.1. This service has to be installed by our customers, so we have to provide it in a friendly installable way. As some of our developers were already used to handle MSI/*.vdproj projects, they added a vdproj into the *.sln to manage that. On a developper machine, this is not a problem even with VS2019: you just have to use the relevant VS studio extension...
But when it comes to building that in a CI/CD context, this becomes a real challenge. I quickly understood that we can't use MSBuild at all for that and found some alternative using directly Visual Studio (devenv)... Inspired by this thread (still opened), I came up with the following command line:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Professional\Common7\IDE\devenv" [...]\MySolution.sln /build "Release" /Project MyInstallationProject
This worked fine both on my developer machine and even on the build agent machine. But when I add it into a build pipeline as a command line task, it seems to hang, and after a while I get the following result for the job:
##[error]The job running on agent <MyAgent> ran longer than the maximum time of 60 minutes. For more information, see https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2077134
What can I do to make it work?
What are the best practices for generating a self installable in a CI/CD context? (Is MSI still relevant? )
As a workaround, you can try to install the extension Build VS Installer and use the task DutchWorkz - Build VS Installer(s) to build Visual Studio Installer Project in Azure Pipelines.
Here are some tickets(ticket1, ticket2) with similar issue you can refer to.
Related
I have a .Net Core 3.1 application that I'd like to deploy as a Self Contained (SCD) Deployment using an MSI Installer in Visual Studio 2019...
I have published the project as an SCD Deployment and I can run this on the target machine just fine
However, I've been asked by IT support to provide an MSI installer for the application as .MSI files work well with some of the admin/control applications they have.
So I created a setup project in my solution and selected 'Publish Items' as the Project Output of the setup project and rebuilt it...
The installer seems to run just fine on the target machine but when we try to run the installed application it says that .Net Core is required ...It's as if the installer has ignored the Self Contained aspect and just installed as a regular Framework Dependent Deployment
Is there a way to create an installer that installs an SCD deployment? Have I made a mistake in my thinking?
Many Thanks in advance,
Andy
The VS Setup Project template is quite old. Most likely it was not updated to be "aware" of the SCD support so it resorts to extracting the classic output binaries from your project.
There are other free tools that you can use to create an MSI from VS, which give you more options to customize and correctly configure the package.
If you have time and want to learn a new skill, try WiX Toolset. It is very powerful but you will need some time to get started.
If you wanted to get it done quickly and avoid the hassle, use the free VS Extension from Advanced Installer. Its GUI allows you to easily create your setup package and it has native support for .NET Core packaging too. If you follow the steps from the linked tutorial it should create a working package for your application.
Disclaimer: I work on the team building Advanced Installer.
I installed Visual Studio 2017.
I wanted to clone a repository and try in my local system.
Suppose i want to clone this. repo (Not mine.) Is it possible in one step?
Or else do i need to write step by step actions and necessary codes to run the project?
By checking NuGut package manager to auto download packages on build time will
work? I am new in ASP.Net. Is there any way to run the project in local system by just cloning.
EDIT:- Tried to restore packages
PM> dotnet restore
Welcome to .NET Core!
---------------------
Learn more about .NET Core: https://aka.ms/dotnet-docs
Use 'dotnet --help' to see available commands or visit: https://aka.ms/dotnet-cli-docs
Telemetry
---------
The .NET Core tools collect usage data in order to help us improve your experience. The data is anonymous and doesn't in
clude command-line arguments. The data is collected by Microsoft and shared with the community. You can opt-out of telem
etry by setting the DOTNET_CLI_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT environment variable to '1' or 'true' using your favorite shell.
Read more about .NET Core CLI Tools telemetry: https://aka.ms/dotnet-cli-telemetry
ASP.NET Core
------------
Successfully installed the ASP.NET Core HTTPS Development Certificate.
To trust the certificate run 'dotnet dev-certs https --trust' (Windows and macOS only). For establishing trust on other
platforms refer to the platform specific documentation.
For more information on configuring HTTPS see https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=848054.
C:\Users\win7.system3\Documents\Visual Studio 2013\Projects\localhost_54920\localhost_54920.sln : Solution file error MS
B4249: Unable to build website project "SAMP". The ASP.NET compiler is only available on the .NET Framework version of MS
Build.
First of all, you'll need .NET Framework 4.6.1 installed in your machine.
Short answer
Having that installed, you should be able to open the project/solution with Visual Studio, build it* and run it from there.
Long answer
If that was a .NET Core project, without Visual Studio it would be as easy as:
git clone https://github.com/sarn1/example-aspnet-mvc
cd example-aspnet-mvc\ComicBookGallery
dotnet run
dotnet run will restore (dotnet restore) the dependencies, build (dotnet build) the project and run it.
However, that's not the case, so you can only:
Restore the nuget packages using Visual Studio or nuget.exe cli.
Compile it* using or msbuild (use Developer Command Prompt for Visual Studio to be able to easily access it).
Run it... from Visual Studio, which makes the rest of the process kind of worthless.
git clone https://github.com/sarn1/example-aspnet-mvc
cd example-aspnet-mvc
nuget.exe restore
msbuild /t:build
* You may need to apply these changes to make the project compile.
I have an ASP.NET Web API project created on Windows using Visual Studio. How can I set this up for use with DNX/DNVM (on a Mac)?
Switching to Git solved the source control compatibility with TFS. But I wasn't able to find references to getting a project working across both these development environments.
I'm assuming as a first step the project will have to be migrated to ASP.NET 5/vNext but wondering other problems lurk around the corner with different project members using different environments.
I get an error when I run - git:(master):dnx . kestrel
As you mentioned yes you will have to migrate any namespace changes. I have a project that is developed across both. Also changing csproj files to xproj. Support is coming for some kind of interop between the different project types but its not here yet.
For build, publish, deploy from git without relying on VS publish capabilities or MSBuild you can follow my blog post here.
Basically you use DNU to publish and then kudu to deploy.
While learning continuous integration, i come across both of these terms. And i got confused. May be it is a very silly question. But i want to know in continuous integration process what are the role of MsBuild.exe and MsDeploy.exe. Can i use one over other. Or do they have there own purpose.
I have also tried to use both options but while using them i got following error on server request timeout for "www.serverurl/MsDeployAgentService"
Should i use www.serverurl.com/msbuild.axd or www.serverurl.com/MsDeployAgentService.
As far as i understand, they both build and publish application with config transform.
Please help me out.
You can't build using msdeploy, but you can build and deploy using msbuild or you can build with msbuild and deploy with msdeploy
MSBuild is a hierarchical target-based build system. It's intent it to run general purpose tasks related to building an application, and is primarily focused around compilation. Visual Studio uses this when you build your project.
MSDeploy (or Microsoft Web Deploy) is a CLI and library for deploying files (and other configuration) between servers. It handles concepts like authentication, skipping files and environment-specific parameters. Visual Studio uses this when you select "Publish".
Does anyone have a good way to build MSI (vdproj) projects using MsBuild or Nant?
I know one answer was to install Visual Studio on the build server and just use devenv.exe to build the project, but, I prefer not to install Visual Studio on our build servers.
Short of the method you mentioned above (devenv), there is no way to do this with the current version of MSBuild.
The method the Visual Studio team uses to run their MSI builds is with Windows Installer XML. You can learn more about using WiX to deploy setup packages here.
Please note WiX doesn't support vdproj files so it means you'll be recreating your installer projects.
Edit: Looks like I was beat to the chase when grabbing my references :)
We use Wix to automate MSI builds for IronPython and IronRuby.
EDIT: to clarify, this probably means starting over from scratch when building your installer. While Wix has a mechanism to create a configuration directly from a preexisting MSI file, I've never gotten a satisfactory result from using this tool